Cultural Foppery

Medical Nemesis By Ivan Illich

Pantheon, 294 pp., $8.95 Ivan Illich has written a very fierce tract against the medical establishment of the Western world, or, as he puts it, the destructive force of over-expanded health care. He is not against doctors or medicine as such, but he is uncompromising as to the necessity of doing away with the social sicknesses that he attributes to medical conditioning and its contemporary parasite spawn—hospitals, pharmaceuticals, health insurance. His claim is that we no longer have control over our health because we are classified as patients before we are even born and live in arbitrary medical pigeonholes for the rest of our lives—”cases” matched to varying degrees of sickness. Finally, he says, we have lost control even of our own death, as, medicated to the gills, we go under for the last time in a spray of plastic tubes and cardiac monitors.

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Nicholas King

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Medical Nemesis By Ivan Illich

Pantheon, 294 pp., $8.95 Ivan Illich has written a very fierce tract against the medical establishment of the Western world, or, as he puts it, the destructive force of over-expanded health care. He is not against doctors or medicine as such, but he is uncompromising as to the necessity of doing away with the social sicknesses that he attributes to medical conditioning and its contemporary parasite spawn—hospitals, pharmaceuticals, health insurance. His claim is that we no longer have control over our health because we are classified as patients before we are even born and live in arbitrary medical pigeonholes for the rest of our lives—”cases” matched to varying degrees of sickness. Finally, he says, we have lost control even of our own death, as, medicated to the gills, we go under for the last time in a spray of plastic tubes and cardiac monitors.