Book: Liberating Medicine

Book overview

In the United States, concerns about health dominate our culture, politics, and personal lives, yet we depend on a medical system that fails to promote health with striking regularity. This dominant medical system – biomedicine – applies principles from biology and other natural sciences to clinical practice. Biomedicine is uniquely effective in preventing and curing specific diseases and most of us assume that having access to biomedicine is essential to enjoy good health. But we know that biomedicine fails to promote health in important ways. In the U.S., medical administrators prioritize profit over healing, clinical practices reinforce racial and gender inequities, and institutional norms lead to professional burnout. Liberating Medicine offers new perspectives on why biomedicine falls short in its ability to make us feel consistently healthy, arguing that to liberate biomedicine’s potential as a healing system we must understand its history as a technology of colonialism. 

The book supports this argument by accessibly synthesizing decades of anthropological, historical, and social scientific research on how colonialism shaped biomedicine and on indigenous and colonized peoples’ concepts of health. Biomedicine rose to global prominence by supporting and benefiting from colonial imperatives to extend European dominance around the world. Biomedical institutions shored up power and authority for European elites and their allies while systematically disempowering indigenous and colonized peoples. Colonial worldviews that espouse Western supremacy continue to shape biomedicine today, and biomedical authorities still dismiss indigenous medical paradigms as inferior despite having appropriated much indigenous knowledge over the years. Simplistic ideas about health that crystallized during the colonial era predominate today, hyper-focusing on individual biophysical processes at the expense of holistic understandings of health rooted in social and ecological relationships. All of this has repercussions for clinical practice and experiences of health and healing. Liberating Medicine’s lucid analysis of the legacy of colonial worldviews in biomedicine enables widespread understanding of this topic and its importance. 

This is the first book written primarily for undergraduate classroom use that demonstrates the centrality of biomedicine’s colonial history for understanding present-day medical care. It is also the only book for students that offers a cross-culturally and historically informed toolkit for actively thinking anew about health and medicine. Many texts for students explore important topics like medical racism and the social determinants of health, but they tend to reinforce, rather than provide alternatives to, biomedicine’s pathology-based, individualistic thinking about health and medicine. Beyond its contributions for students enrolled in courses like Medical Anthropology, Medical Sociology, Medical Humanities, Bioethics, History of Medicine, Public Health, and Global Health, Liberating Medicine offers insights for scholars in these fields. The book offers medical anthropology a much-needed analysis of the very concept of health and demonstrates the value of focusing more on popular (or vernacular) approaches to health and healing (i.e., moving beyond biomedical perspectives and sites which receive outsized anthropological attention). For historians and scholars of STS (Science and Technology Studies) this book synthesizes a growing social and cultural historiography of medicine rooted in decolonial, feminist, and other critical theoretical approaches. Benefiting students, scholars, and medical practitioners alike, this book highlights the intellectual contributions of indigenous and colonized peoples to biomedicine and theories of health, unsettling assumptions about scientific progress and the inferiority of non-scientific ways of knowing.