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This highly original book is the first to explore the political and
philosophical consequences of Hannah Arendt's concept of 'the
banality of evil, ' a term she used to describe Adolph Eichmann,
architect of the Nazi 'final solution.' According to Bernard J.
Bergen, the questions that preoccupied Arendt were the meaning and
significance of the Nazi genocide to our modern times. As Bergen
describes Arendt's struggle to understand 'the banality of evil, '
he shows how Arendt redefined the meaning of our most treasured
political concepts and principles_freedom, society, identity,
truth, equality, and reason_in light of the horrific events of the
Holocaust. Arendt concluded that the banality of evil results from
the failure of human beings to fully experience our common human
characteristics_thought, will, and judgment_and that the exercise
and expression of these attributes is the only chance we have to
prevent a recurrence of the kind of terrible evil perpetrated by
the Nazi
In recent years, relations between patients and physicians in
America have undergone a dramatic change. The growing acceptance of
natural childbirth, support groups for patients with serious
illnesses, health maintenance organizations, and hospices for a
"happy death" among family and friends is part of a redefinition of
medical practice and reformulation of the field of medical power.
No longer is medical practice confined to "taming the beast" of
death and fighting the diseases observable in the human body. The
modern practitioner is now a manager of the living, taking an
ecological view of the patient as a "whole person" in a network of
relationships.
"Medicine and the Management of Living" questions how it has been
possible for the patient to change from a silenced specimen
observed in the clinic to a person whose subjective experience of
illness is important to medical practice and discourse. Arney and
Bergen ask, What incited the demand that medicine take the whole
person, including the patient's presentation of his or her illness,
into consideration? And in whose terms are patients speaking about
themselves? The authors argue that the inclusion of patients'
experiences in medical discourse that has come about since the
1950s is not so much a result of a "patient rebellion" as an
activity preciptated by the medical establishment itself. Drawing
inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault, Arney and Bergen
examine the structure of medical power, contending that new social
technologies like support groups make the patient's subjectivity
available for medical evaluation, judgment, and manipulation.
Throughout this sensitively written discussion, the authors vivify
theissues they raise with excerpts from many sources--the writings
of a poet dying of cancer, the comments of doctors pondering their
own fatal illnesses, and excerpts from popular magazines, medical
journals, and sociological studies. They examine the changing role
of the medical profession through history, using a modern
advertising image and woodcuts from Vesalius's Renaissance anatomy
text to show the symbolic portrayal of health and medicine. Their
wide-ranging concerns lead the reader through such topics as
teenage pregnancy; the historical treatment of medical anomalies
like hermaphrodites and the "elephant man" (John Merrick); and
literary representations of illness in Sartre, Chekhov, and Brian
Clark's recent Broadway drama, "Whose Life Is It Anyway?"
In a provocative yet thoughtful way, "Medicine and the Management
of Living" points the way for a radical reassessment of medical
power and the medical establishment.
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