« Drugs have risks? | Main | mammograms »
June 07, 2007
Rivers North
I have finally starting reading The Rivers North of the Future: the Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley. It is fascinating, a conversation more than a treatise. There are some rather broad historical summaries, much like Rosenstock-Huessy. What follows are gross oversimplifications of his gross oversimplifications.
He states at one point that he did not go far enough in Medical Nemesis, that he missed the major point. The problem is not iatrogenesis as now commonly understood. It is rather that our bodies now are doctor-created. We think of ourselves in terms given to us by medicine. These great illustrations (that pretend they are depicting reality but are really artists’ renditions of various physico-chemical models) and the House animations of disease mechanisms give us a body that is very different from what our forebears were.
All of this comes from the change in the 12th century of the tool as an independent entity. It took doctors another 6-8 centuries to view disease as an independent entity. All of this is related to the change in understanding about the Real Presence of Christ in the supper.
Illich views all of this as a perversion of the Church, and of the Incarnation, that was built into it from the very beginning. He refers to this as the “mystery of evil,” using Paul’s phrase to the Thessalonians. So Western Civ, modernism, is not post-Christian or developed Christian thought, but anti-Christian thought that is built into the very fabric of the Church. He wonders why God would do this. It seems to me that it is to mature us as a people.
Cultural iatrogenesis | By Robert Maddox | 08:11 AM