“Your Time or Mine?” An Anthropological View of the Tragic Temporal Contradictions of Biomedical Practice
- 1 January 1988
- journal article
- review article
- Published by SAGE Publications in International Journal of Health Services
- Vol. 18 (1), 11-34
- https://doi.org/10.2190/gcuh-mg8g-jpkv-nlbq
Abstract
The symbolic construction and use of time in health care is examined both in relation to social control of patients and to the power/powers accorded to and claimed by physicians. After reviewing classical medical sociology approaches of Zerubavel and Roth, it is suggested that an anthropological approach using concepts of disease, illness, and sickness and especially the last make it possible to produce a more adequate analysis. The cultural performance of sickness is seen in a framework of power, space, and time, and comparisons drawn between preindustrial and industrial patterns of healing (including Hahn's detailed ethnographic account of the practice of an internist in the United States). It is argued that medicine as it is at present practiced in industrial society inevitably requires health workers and especially physicians to distance themselves in time from the experience of their patients by taking the present-tense account of perceived illness (the history), which they initially share, and translating it into timeless, almost disembodied, disease. The physicians' special position in relation to time makes symbolically possible their control not only over patients' access to space and use of time but also over patients' autonomy in controlling the body and its boundaries. Finally, it is proposed that, although the contradiction arises from the theory and practice of biomedicine itself, the ability of health workers to overcome it is related to the extent to which the exercise of power within medicine reinforces (or is reinforced by) the ideology of the society in which it operates.Keywords
This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:
- Sickness as Cultural Performance: Drama, Trajectory, and Pilgrimage Root Metaphors and the Making Social of DiseaseInternational Journal of Health Services, 1986
- A World of Internal Medicine: Portrait of an InternistPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,1985
- Space and time in British general practiceSocial Science & Medicine, 1985
- The patient's viewSocial Science & Medicine, 1984
- Research in general practice: pursuit of knowledge or defence of wisdom?BMJ, 1984
- The summer diseaseSocial Science & Medicine. Part D: Medical Geography, 1978
- Functionalism and after? Theory and Developments in Social Science Applied to the Health FieldInternational Journal of Health Services, 1974
- Pathways to the doctor—From person to patientSocial Science & Medicine (1967), 1973
- Medicine as an Institution of Social ControlSociological Review, 1972
- IV.—TIME AND THEORY IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGYMind, 1958