Forms of Living
What does the infamous face transplant in France in 2005 share with the examination of “swollen faces” in Latin America in the 1930s? What does blood transfusion in Europe during the 17th century have in common with the discovery of mosquitoes as parasitic vectors in China at the close of the 19th century? And, last, how does the reconstruction of noses using skin flaps in Bologna in the 16th century relate to the opening of a forehead cyst in Guatemala in 1916? The six essays that form Figures of Medicine present a wealth of symmetries. François Delaporte shows that each epistemological concern demands its own mode of engagement; problems reside not only in their objects but also in the historical situations in which they emerge. Focusing on efforts to resolve medical problems that are particular and nonetheless exemplary, Delaporte unpacks these separate cases to show how multiple actors—over long periods of time and across different geographies—must be taken into account to remove epistemological blockages that stand in the way of understanding. A remarkable contribution to the history of science and medicine, this book shows the value of historical epistemology from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives.
François Delaporte’s Chagas Disease chronicles Brazilian medicine’s encounter with a disease, an insect, and a history of discovery. Between 1909 and 1911, Carlos Chagas described an infection (pathogenic trypanosome), its intermediate host, and the illness that he believed it caused, parasitic thyroiditis. Chagas’s work did not lack significance: the disease that came to share his name would be one of Latin America’s most serious endemic diseases. However, the clinical identification of the disease through “Romaña’s sign” (a palpebral edema or swelling of the eyelid) some decades later marked a transformation in the general medical knowledge of the disease and its basis altogether. Not only was the disease entity that Chagas had described shown to be a nosological illusion, but twenty-five years of scientific controversy turned out to have been based on a misunderstanding. The continued use of the term “Chagas’s Disease” even after Cecilio Romaña’s discovery thus refers to a fundamental ambiguity. Delaporte dispels this ambiguity by re-examining the various discoveries, dead ends, controversies, and major epistemological transformations that marked the history of the disease––a history that begins with the creation of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro and ends in the forests of Santa Fe in northern Argentina. Delaporte’s study shows how an epistemological focus can add depth to the history of medicine and complexity to accounts of scientific discovery.
At the time of his death in 1995, Georges Canguilhem was a highly respected historian of science and medicine, whose engagement with questions of normality, the ideologization of scientific thought, and the conceptual history of biology had marked the thought of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze. This collection of short, incisive, and highly accessible essays on the major concepts of modern medicine shows Canguilhem at the peak of his use of historical practice for philosophical engagement. In order to elaborate a philosophy of medicine, Canguilhem examines paramount problems such as the definition and uses of health, the decline of the Hippocratic understanding of nature, the experience of disease, the limits of psychology in medicine, myths and realities of therapeutic practices, the difference between cure and healing, the organism’s self-regulation, and medical metaphors linking the organism to society. Writings on Medicine is at once an excellent introduction to Canguilhem’s work and a forceful, insightful, and accessible engagement with elemental concepts in medicine. The book is certain to leave its imprint on anthropology, history, philosophy, bioethics, and the social studies of medicine.
The traditional way of understanding life, as a self-appropriating and self-organizing process of not ceasing to exist, of taking care of one’s own hunger, is challenged by today’s unprecedented proliferation of discourses and techniques concerning the living being. This challenge entails questioning the fundamental concepts of metaphysical thinking—namely, time, finality, and, above all, being. Garrido argues that today we are in a position to repeat Nietzsche’s assertion that there is no other representation of “being” than that of “living.” But in order to carry out this deconstruction of ontology, we need to find new ways of asking: What is life? In this study, Garrido establishes the basic elements of the question concerning life through readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; through the discussion of scientific breakthroughs in thermodynamics and evolutionary and developmental biology; and through the reexamination of the notion of hunger in both its metaphysical and its political implications.
The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the latter from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban space, and corpses started to be viewed as terrifyingly noxious substances. The dead had fallen victim to a sustained reflection on the notions of life and death that emerged from the two new medical fields of biology and hygiene. In large part, the Paris of the nineteenth century—the Paris of modernity—arose, both theoretically and physically, out of this concern over the relations between the animate and the inanimate. As the dead became a source of pervasive and intense anxiousness, they also became an object of fascination that at once exceeded and guided the medical imagination attempting to control them. Human Remains examines that exuberant anxiety to discover the irrational, indeed erotic, forces motivating the medicalization of death. Working across a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the book seeks to understand the meaning of the dead and their role in creating one of the most important cities of the contemporary world.
As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects.
