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3rd Global Conference
Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease
Monday 5th July - Friday 9th July 2004
St Catherine's College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstract & Papers
Session 9: Health, Illness
and Disease in Historical Perspective
Chair: Bindhulakshmi
The 1918 Influenza Epidemic
Anne Pierce
Huntersville, North Carolina
No abstract is presently available
Anatomical Knowledge and the Anatomy of Medical Knowledge: Some (Post)colonial
Indian Inquiries
Jayanta Bhattacharya
Tulsitala, P.O: Raiganj,
Uttar Dinajpur, WB, India
No abstract is presently available
The ‘Body’ in Psychopathology
Ian Tucker
Loughborough University, United Kingdom
This paper is drawn from a wider project focused on identifying and analysing some of the ways that the ‘body’ is made salient in psychopathology. It seeks to analyse how people diagnosed ‘schizophrenic’ make sense of and relate to their bodies in terms of their ‘illness’ experiences. For example, what is the relationship between their bodies and their medication? How do they assign meaning and decide how and if their medication is working? How does it function and how do they relate to it? Do social spaces become territorialised and embodied? One cannot think or conceptualise the body without recognising that it is in a constant relationship with our social world. Our bodies are unfinished products of both social and natural processes (Shilling, 2003), and these processes need to be addressed and analysed as inter-relational rather than distinct factors operating in isolation. The focus then is on the natural and social processes that ‘produce’ the body in psychopathology, and how people diagnosed 'schizophrenic’ relate and make sense of their bodies in terms of these processes through the relationships they have with their bodies. Drawing from recent work in social theory (e.g. Shilling, 2003; Burkitt, 1999) that has sought to conceptualise embodiment as part of a matrix of different relations, this work attempts to further understanding in psychopathology and add to the growing field of ‘body work’ in social theory.
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