Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘age of the show’: On the Expropriation of Death
Nursing Philosophy 19 (1):e12187 (2018)
Abstract
What Ivan Illich regarded in his Medical Nemesis as the ‘expropriation of health’ takes place on the surfaces and in the spaces of the screens all around us, including our cell phones but also the patient monitors and (increasingly) the iPads that intervene between nurse and patient. To explore what Illich called the ‘age of the show’, this essay uses film examples, like Creed and the controversial documentary Vaxxed, and the television series Nurse Jackie. Rocky’s cancer in his last film (submitting to chemo to ‘fight’ cancer) highlights what Illich along with Petr Skrabanek called the ‘expropriation of death’. In contrast to what Illich denotes as ‘Umsonstigkeit’ – i.e., a free gift, given undeservedly, i.e., gratuitously – medical science tends to be tempted by what Illich terms scientistic ‘black magic’, taking over (expropriating) the life and the death of the patient in increasingly technological ways, a point underscored in the concluding section on the commercial prospects of xenotransplants using factory farm or mass-produced (and already for some time) human-pig mosaics or chimeras.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1111/nup.12187
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Citations of this work
Material hermeneutics and Heelan’s philosophy of technoscience.Babette Babich - forthcoming - AI and Society:1-12.
References found in this work
La dissémination.Jacques Derrida - 1974 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 164 (2):256-256.
Why is preventive medicine exempted from ethical constraints?P. Skrabanek - 1990 - Journal of Medical Ethics 16 (4):187-190.
Cyborgs, biotechnologies, and informatics in health care - new paradigms in nursing sciences.Ana Paula Teixeira de Almeida Vieir Monteiro - 2016 - Nursing Philosophy 17 (1):19-27.
Problems with the electronic health record.Hans-Peter de Ruiter, Joan Liaschenko & Jan Angus - 2016 - Nursing Philosophy 17 (1):49-58.