It is an axiom of contemporary conversations about austerity and health care that the relationship between the two is essentially direct. Cutting funds damages health care systems and hurts the health of individuals who rely on them. Though this premise has provoked necessary discussion about global politics, the global economy and their impact on individual well-being, it is nonetheless intrinsically problematic. Assigning health and health care as objects of austerity not only obscures the complexity of health care systems and the (...) opacity of health’s definitional borders, but also misunderstands austerity, its manifestations and its significance. The ambition of this essay is to bring health care back into the debate, in order to establish the greater dynamism of the contemporary austerity and health care relationship. This historical reconstruction will challenge the significance of our current situating of austerity as health care’s bogeyman, press for a reconsideration of our contemporary definitions of the key factors involved here and finally conclude with some thoughts on how we might more productively approach the problem of health now. (shrink)

In the late 1920s, the American obstetrician Joseph DeLee brought the motion-picture camera into the birth room. Following that era's trend of adapting industrial efficiency practices for medical environments, DeLee's films give spectacular and unexpected expression to the engineering concept of ‘streamlining’. Accomplishing what more tangible obstetric streamlining practices had failed to, DeLee's cameras, and his post-production manipulation, shifted birth from messy and dangerous to rationalized, efficient, death-defying. This was film as an active and effective medical tool. Years later, the (...) documentarian Pare Lorentz produced and wrote his own birth film,The Fight for Life(1940). The documentary subject of the film was DeLee himself, and the film was set in his hospitals, on the same maternity ‘sets’ that had once showcased film's remarkable streamlining capacity to give and keep life. Yet relatively little of DeLee was retained in the film's content, resulting in a showdown that, by way of contrast, further articulated DeLee's understanding of film's medical powers and, in so doing, hinted at a more dynamic moment in the history of medicine while speaking also to the process by which that understanding ceased to be historically legible. (shrink)

Each time patients and their families are asked to make a decision about resuscitation, they are also asked to engage the political, social, and cultural concerns that have shaped its history. That history is exemplified in the career of Claude S. Beck, arguably the most influential researcher and teacher of resuscitation in the twentieth century. Careful review of Beck’s work discloses that the development and popularization of the techniques of resuscitation proceeded through a multiplication of definitions of death. CPR consequently (...) remains unique among medical treatments, because it is indicated precisely when a person dies, depending always on how each event of death becomes defined practically by patients, families, and medical professionals present at the time. It is therefore as an occasion to manage a surplus of definitions of death, and not as an occasion to determine the physiological efficacy of resuscitation, that one should approach analysis of contemporary challenges in decision-making about resuscitation. (shrink)

Each time patients and their families are asked to make a decision about resuscitation, they are also asked to engage the political, social, and cultural concerns that have shaped its history. That history is exemplified in the career of Claude S. Beck, arguably the most influential researcher and teacher of resuscitation in the twentieth century. Careful review of Beck’s work discloses that the development and popularization of the techniques of resuscitation proceeded through a multiplication of definitions of death. CPR consequently (...) remains unique among medical treatments, because it is indicated precisely when a person dies, depending always on how each event of death becomes defined practically by patients, families, and medical professionals present at the time. It is therefore as an occasion to manage a surplus of definitions of death, and not as an occasion to determine the physiological efficacy of resuscitation, that one should approach analysis of contemporary challenges in decision-making about resuscitation. (shrink)