In his chapter, “Theory and Discipline,” Moran includes some interesting assertions about Western medicine. He attributes the advancement of medicine as a discipline to a strict hierarchy of knowledge (like debunking certain practices like bloodletting) and people. As for the personal hierarchy, Porter comments , “… physicians at the top and surgeons and apothecaries at the bottom, and other healers dismissed as quacks.” The hierarchy of Western medicine seems to have forgotten the patient, strewn at the feet of the pyramid. Porter finds a place for the patient and observes, “Western medical tradition has been distinguished by its explanation of sickness not in terms of the relation between the individual and the world but in terms of the body itself.” Porter asserts that sickness is viewed in a one-dimensional way – through the body.
This assertion is in direct conversation with the research about illness narratives I’ve been doing with Dr. Guzmán in Anthropology. I analyze ethnographic interviews about medical choice and illness narratives in Southern Chile. The clinical and medical narratives typical of Western medicine almost erase the patient’s agency and experience though medical jargon. Illness narratives provide a space of reclamation for folks who have experienced/ are experiencing illness. Narrative is not clinical, but refers to the lens through which the ill person sees the world due to their sickness.
Part of the advent of illness narratives into mainstream culture and practice has been a reclamation of experience, agency, and health. Illness narratives focus on the intersection of self and illness. These narratives allow folks to interact with their experience Narrative is not clinical, but refers to the lens through which the ill person sees the world due to their sickness. Western medicine as a solely clinical body is detrimental to patients. Two women on the forefront of discourse analysis are Lisa Capps and Elinor Ochs. Capps, a psychologist, and Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist make an interdisciplinary dynamic duo powerhouse. They perform a study with Meg, a woman with agoraphobia.The women are given a unique view into Meg’s disorder through grammar and narrative construction analysis. When folks are given space to talk about their illnesses, it allows them to have a little control of their story which is often flooded with complicated jargon.