by Sayantani DasGupta
about Sayantani DasGupta
Sayantani DasGupta is a senior lecturer in the graduate program in narrative medicine, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, all at Columbia University. She is the co-author of The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine.
Medicalization
The term “medicalization” came into popular and academic use in the 1970s and can perhaps be first traced to medical sociologist Ivan Illich’s book _Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemeses_ (1975). Illich used the term in his discussion of “iatrogenesis,” the ways that medicine itself may make social and biological conditions worse as a result of medical intervention. In his book _The Medicalization of Society_, Peter Conrad defines medicalization as “a process by which nonmedical problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illness and disorders” (2007, 4). The medicalization of disability, then, refers to how individuals with disabilities have been categorized as “sick” and placed under the jurisdiction of the medical establishment and medical professionals. This model views disability solely through the lens of impairment and is undoubtedly related to what sociologist Arthur Frank (1995) has critiqued as medicine’s investment in the “restitution narrative”: the belief that all conditions are “treatable” through medical intervention, which then returns the “sufferer” to the condition of “health” and “normalcy.” The historical roots of disability’s medicalization can be traced to nineteenth-century shifts from feudal to capitalist economies. The mid-1800s marked a change in how bodies were commodified and classified, with...
Medicine
_The Origin of Medical Terms_ suggests the word _medicine_ is originally from the Latin _medicina_, implying the art of healing. The verb _medeor_ may have more complex Indo-European roots, meaning “to think” or “to reflect” (Charyn 1951). In modern usage, _medicine_ implies something more practical—both the pharmaceutical drugs used to treat disease and the profession of medicine itself. Indeed, this transition from a reflective meaning to an active one might be at the root of mainstream Western medicine’s often fraught relationship with the health humanities, a field that asks those whose professional identities are built on agentic “doing” to reflect, analyze, and consider in unfamiliar and often discomfiting ways (Boler 1999). Although the word _medicine_ is often used interchangeably with _health care_ as a whole, this conflation erases the particular and unique skills and contributions of nurses, nurse practitioners (NPs), physician’s assistants (PAs), social workers, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and other health-care professionals. Indeed, the history of the professionalization of medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion. Moves to professionalize medicine in the mid-nineteenth century were as much to regulate ill-qualified and ill-trained practitioners...