Rethinking Postmodern Maladies

Abstract

This article is a reconsideration of the traditional understanding of health and disease. In view of the of psychosomatic `syndromes' and `disorders' that characterize the postmodern experience, this article suggests that the illnesses of postmodernity reflect a shift in the way we conceptualize health and disease. By reassessing the basis of our understanding of ill health and health we subsequently undermine the nature/culture dichotomy that has supported the tradition of allopathic medicine. By examining the advances in genetics and modern biotechnology it is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down any essentialist notion of humanity. Without this backdrop on which to demarcate the `other', Cartesian medical assumptions are open to question. These doubts are emphasized by the body's production of the `syndrome' or `disorder' where understanding health and disease in terms of mind/body dualism is becoming increasingly inadequate and instead reinforcing of the inseparability of the constructs of nature and culture.