This paper is about the ontology of a cancer diagnosis at high-end hospitals in Colombia. Drawing on a seventeen-month ethnographic fieldwork study in this country, it pays attention to how dermatologists, pathologists, and oncologists looked at my partner’s skin during a routine medical checkup and enacted two seemingly contradictory diagnoses: a lethal melanoma and a benign dysplastic nevus—commonly known as mole. Because their differences under the microscope or through dermatology goggles may be subtle, physicians often disagree on what they see. (...) When medical services are not unrelated to the economic possibilities of patients to pay for them, what emerges through a microscope might be different. With neoliberal medical reforms in Colombia as background, this paper focuses on the ontological indeterminacy of cancer and its relationship to high-end hospitals and a patient who could, albeit not without effort, pay for the treatment. Thus, I argue that how physicians saw was not unrelated to what they saw and therefore to their practices of medicine in neoliberal Colombia. How do medical practices and ways of seeing in Colombia enter into composition with the bodies they study? Could the same skin tissue simultaneously be cancerous and noncancerous? (shrink)

This essay examines a challenge to common literary representations of female mental illness in the Early Modern period—the hysterical woman—in a collection of French short stories contemporary to Vesalius's De Fabrica: Jeanne Flore's Tales and Trials of Love. Jeanne Flore's tales depict several mentally disturbed female protagonists, young women prone to paroxysms of madness and self-mutilation. This study maintains that while Tales and Trials of Love superficially participates in the literary tradition that grew out of those accepted social and medical (...) beliefs, it also questions the long-accepted paradigm of female hysteria and points to a shift in the socio-medical climate. Jeanne Flore's fictional narratives suggest that mental illness no longer consists in the realignment of a uterine imbalance, but rather in the telling of personal stories, a precursor to psychoanalysis and narrative medicine. (shrink)

The placenta’s role as a mediating passage between bodies has been a conceptual resource for feminist theorists and philosophers interested in developing more nuanced explanations of the maternal–fetal relation, a relation that has tended to be identified with maternal and fetal bodies rather than with the placenta between them. I draw on efforts by philosopher Luce Irigaray and her readers to theorise placental relations as a model for the negotiation of differences. In her more recent work, Irigaray figures the placenta (...) as an enveloping space of metaphorical enclosure. The placental relation in Irigaray’s work thus offers insights into the temporal structure of her theory of becoming and can inform a more ‘materialist’ account of pregnancy. I then consider how placental relations are conceptual resources for re-imagining relations of self–other in pregnancy, and for addressing emergent ethical concerns over the transformation of the placenta into a scientific object. (shrink)

Freud's analogies were legion: hydraulic pipes, military recruitment, magic writing pads. These and some three hundred others took features of the mind and bound them to far-off scenes – the id only very partially resembles an uncontrollable horse, as Freud took pains to note. But there was one relation between psychic and public act that Freud did not delimit in this way: censorship, the process that checked memories and dreams on their way to the conscious. At first, Freud likened this (...) suppression to the blacking out of texts at the Russian frontier. During the First World War, he suffered, and spoke of suffering under, Viennese postal and newspaper censorship – Freud was forced to leave his envelopes unsealed, and to recode or delete content. Over and over, he registered the power of both internal and public censorship in shared form: distortion, anticipatory deletion, softenings, even revision to hide suppression. Political censorship left its mark as the conflict reshaped his view of the psyche into a society on a war footing, with homunculus-like border guards sifting messages as they made their way – or did not – across a topography of mind. (shrink)

This article considers how seventeenth-century writer John Milton engages in modes of thinking that register the obstetric revolution occurring during the period. During a time when physicians were gaining entry to the birthing room, a medical rhetoric of childbirth was developing that cast childbirth in new pathological terms. Milton's A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle demonstrates how childbirth was influenced by emerging obstetrical language and practice, as well as the ways in which a writer might question such influence. Finally, this (...) article also draws links between disrupted historical rituals of childbirth and modern anxieties about medically-centred birthing practices. (shrink)