A tale of two bodies

the cartesian corpse and the lived body

Drew Leder

pp. 17-35

in: Drew Leder (ed), The body in medical thought and practice, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstract

Open a medical textbook; lie down upon a physician's examining table; attend grand rounds at a teaching hospital; and you find yourself immersed in a complex web of discourses and practices which together constitute the paradigm of modern medicine. This paradigm involves certain governing assumptions which are often overlooked because they are simply taken for granted. These include assumptions concerning the nature of disease entities, the canons of acceptable explanation, the modes of proper treatment. Moreover, such assumptions can ultimately be traced back to an implicit metaphysics. Ours is not a medicine of evil spirits or angry Gods, but of material causes and manifestations. If we are to understand the strengths and limits of our medicine and envision its alternatives, we must come to grips with the world-view it assumes. In what follows I shall address a key aspect of this world-view — the notion of "body" operative in modern medicine. After doing so, I will suggest a relevant alternative developed in twentieth-century phenomenology: that is, the model of the "lived body".