Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘age of the show’: On the Expropriation of Death
Nursing Philosophy 19 (1):e12187 (2018)
Abstract
What Ivan Illich regarded in his Medical Nemesis as the ‘expropriation of health’ takes
place on the surfaces and in the spaces of the screens all around us, including our cell
phones but also the patient monitors and (increasingly) the iPads that intervene between
nurse and patient. To explore what Illich called the ‘age of the show’, this essay
uses film examples, like Creed and the controversial documentary Vaxxed, and the
television series Nurse Jackie. Rocky’s cancer in his last film (submitting to chemo to
‘fight’ cancer) highlights what Illich along with Petr Skrabanek called the ‘expropriation
of death’. In contrast to what Illich denotes as ‘Umsonstigkeit’ – i.e., a free gift, given
undeservedly, i.e., gratuitously – medical science tends to be tempted by what Illich
terms scientistic ‘black magic’, taking over (expropriating) the life and the death of the
patient in increasingly technological ways, a point underscored in the concluding section on the commercial prospects of xenotransplants using factory farm or mass-produced (and already for some time) human-pig mosaics or chimeras.
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