The Distressed Body

Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment,
and Healing

(University of Chicago, 2016)

Bodily pain and distress come in many forms. They can well up from within at times of serious illness, but the body can also be subjected to harsh treatment from outside. The medical system is often cold and depersonalized, and much worse are conditions experienced by prisoners in our age of mass incarceration, and by animals trapped in our factory farms. In this pioneering book, Drew Leder offers bold new ways to rethink how we create and treat distress, clearing the way for more humane social practices.

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Leder draws on literary examples, clinical and philosophical sources, his medical training, and his own struggle with chronic pain. He levies a challenge to the capitalist and Cartesian models that rule modern medicine. Similarly, he looks at the root paradigms of our penitentiary and factory farm systems and the way these produce distressed bodies, asking how such institutions can be reformed. Writing with coauthors ranging from a prominent cardiologist to long-term inmates, he explores alternative environments that can better humanize (even spiritualize) the way we treat one another, offering a very different vision of medical, criminal justice, and food systems. Ultimately Leder proposes not just new answers to important bioethical questions but new ways of questioning accepted concepts and practices.

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Read the Introductory Chapter

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The Enlightened Prison (a version of Chapter 11)

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"Leder here offers a truly creative and compelling study of the nature of distressed embodiment. He identifies one of the key culprits in the mistreatment of humans and animals to be the Cartesian-rooted notion that a fundamental divide exists between mind and body. This, Leder argues, often leads people to consider our own and others’ bodies as passive, commodifiable, machine-like, and/or alien. Leder's descriptions and diagnoses of these problematic conceptions are truly eye-opening, and he offers rich resources for thinking anew the nature of embodied reality and the many ways we have for recuperating a more holistic relationship to embodiment."

Kirsten Jacobson, University of Maine

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"Leder invites his reader to focus anew upon the distress, in its full measure of harshness and complexity, of those who find themselves ill. Their plight, Leder emphasizes, has not disappeared, no matter how scientifically enlightened or technologically effective medical practices have become. The investigations that follow offer the fruits of a lifelong engagement on the part of their author into how a phenomenological account of the body is crucial for (re)orienting medicine to its core missions of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. With a novelist's eye for telling detail but a tone of intimacy with the reader that is uncommon for philosophical texts, he invites us into the philosophical equivalent of medical consultation and demonstrates that working out the paradoxes involved when living bodies are treated by other living bodies is crucial if medicine is to remain true to its charge of healing those who suffer."

James Hatley, Salisbury University

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Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Part 1 Illness and Treatment: Phenomenological Investigations

• 1 Rethinking Illness: Philoctete's Exile

• 2 Rethinking Pain: The Paradoxical Problem

• 3 Rethinking Touch: How Then Does It Heal?

• 4 Rethinking Pills: Fantasies, Realities, Possibilities

• 5 Rethinking Clinical Practice: Toward a More Materialistic Medicine

• Part 2 Medicine and Bioethics: Hermeneutical Reflections

• 6 Rethinking Diagnosis: The Many Texts of Medicine

• 7 Rethinking Bioethics: Questioning Our Answers and Our Questions

• 8 Rethinking Organ Transplants: Whose Body, What Body?

• Part 3 Discarded and Recovered Bodies: Animals and Prisoners

• 9 Rethinking Factory Farms: Old McDonalds Had a What?

• 10 Rethinking Imprisonment: The Life-World of the Incarcerated

• 11 Rethinking Prisons: The Enlightened (and Endarkened) Prison

• 12 Rethinking Prisoners and Animals: "They're Animals" and Their Animals

• 13 Rethinking Humans and/as Animals: The Art of Shape-Shifting

• Acknowledgments

• Notes

• Bibliography

• Index