Offline: The embodiment of political failure

Cost of living. energy price. interest. inflation. tax. Currency value. These measures are creating a new map of the economic crisis. But the politics of this global turmoil are strangely abstract. Public debates are mainly conducted in person. It is particularly clinical in the sense that it is sterile, emotionless, and coldly detached from human reality. Nevertheless, it is the human body that suffers the severe effects of the toxic social catastrophe that combines war and governmental incompetence. Our skin is the canvas upon which political failures are cut.

In the latest memoirs of Edouard Louis, woman’s battle and transformation, he chronicles the humiliation and misery engraved in a mother’s presence in an industrially debilitated area of ​​northern France. He describes how her poverty, society, and the power of masculinity (particularly her father’s) have transformed her. He cries out against “the injustice of her destruction.” Louis’ aim is not only to tell the story of her mother, but also to analyze her insults to the body, “feelings that the body cannot express.” “You’re the reason I smoke,” she would say. Tobacco was her response to growing stress and shame, deprivation and destitution. She became a prisoner of her own home life, a daily victim of her husband’s physical and psychological attacks, sometimes doctors were called to her aid.But “his very presence changed our bodies. We changed our attitudes and the way we spoke for fear that a simple gesture would expose our social inferiority complex. “Medicine offered nothing for families engaged in multiple acts of socially determined self-harm—our stress and shame.” new statesman, Louis put it this way: “The body is the material expression of the violence of the social world.” As a writer, he considers himself a surgeon who performs a “social autopsy.” “To me the body expresses what the world is, what society is. It’s a way to talk about issues”—class domination, racism, homophobia. There is literature about its realization in medicine. But, in principle, medicine has stripped the body from medicine. Efforts have been made to restore the body. Nancy Krieger wrote a landmark glossary of epidemiology in 2005. She made her three claims. First, the body tells the story of our existence, the story that must be heard. Second, the stories told by the body may not quite match the person’s stated description. And third, the body reveals stories that people cannot tell. Lewis argues that the biological and social aspects of our lives are intertwined in ways we often prefer to ignore. , criticizes the way in which non-embodied ‘behaviours’ and ‘exposures’ interact in the same way with decontextualized and non-embodied ‘genes’. Doctors and medical scientists all too often conspire to cover up the embodied injustices that surround us.

As medical students, we learn the causes of disease and are taught what we can do to reduce the harmful effects of those causes. , to support campaigns to minimize alcohol consumption. All epidemiologically correct, of course. and often misplaced. Louis says: bourgeois Being attentive and caring makes you feel important. His point is that “people in a given environment only interact with people in the same environment, and . . . mixing between social classes is virtually impossible”. is. As healthcare faces communities enduring extreme economic hardship, future shrinkage, and pervasive fear, the need to avoid contractual terms commonly promulgated by governments and our own teachings. there is. Instead of the language of epidemiological abstractions, we must argue that the deterioration of the material condition of our communities is inflicting biological violence on the bodies that inhabit those communities. The mandate is that medicine must move from the non-physical study of human society and health to the physical study. Her message is more urgent than ever.