Reviews
Ivan Illich is a famous and savage critic of industrial society. I am in total agreement with many of [his] wider arguments.Times Education Supplement
Limits to Medicine
Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health
Ivan Illich [+–]
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter, he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence (Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the United States, he died in 2002.
‘The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.’ This is the opening statement and basic contention of Ivan Illich’s searing social critique. In Limits to Medicine, Ivan Illich has enlarged on his theme of disabling social services, schools, and transport, which have become, through over-industrialization, harmful to man. In this radical contribution to social thinking, Illich decimates the myth of the magic of the medical profession. Illich argues that through iatrogenic diseases (ones that result from medical treatment), doctors can find themselves doing as much harm as good, and that there is a limit to the amount of medicine that a civilization should believe it is good to give.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Preface
Part I. Clinical Iatrogenesis
Part II. Social Iatrogenesis
Part III. Cultural Iatrogenesis
Part IV. The Politics of Health
Times Education Supplement