Here’s something I’ve learned recently: Always look beautiful. This is because: Those other people who are all wrapped up in their own trips will think you’re some kind of angelic being, and will just fall in line. Those other people who are tuned in will recognize that you’re not actually faking it and that you’re …
Patterns: body
Consuming patients
Yesterday I had the chance to meet and enjoy a delicious dinner with Joel Braslow, a historian and psychiatrist who has done some great work on the history of 20th century psychiatric practices in the United States. His first book, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures, is a fascinating look at California state hospitals in the …
Communication, criticism, and medicine
Looking over Foucault’s ingenious structural history of medical practice, The Birth of the Clinic (1963; English translation 1973) I was struck by how well Foucault’s early work draws together communication, critical theory, and the anthropology of medicine. The study of communication–language, symbols, discourses–is at the heart of any serious attempt to understand–to set apart, to …
