"Modern Medicine" and its Borders

As the phrase “the wonders of modern medicine” has been tossed around frequently over the past few decades, what actually constitutes “modern medicine” has scarcely been interrogated. The acceptance in the United States and other “developed” countries of Western Biomedicine as the only acceptable form of health care has implications for gender, racial, and sexuality minorities, as well as those in the working class. In “Unsettling Care”, Michelle Murphy explores how the concept of care has impacted health from a feminist perspective, digging deeper into how medicine and care are treated in a society and how those treatments can be used to harm or advantage individuals based on gender, race, and class. In “Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveler,” Kathy Davis looks at, through the story of the global proliferation of Our Bodies, Our Selves, how North American health literature and perspectives can be successfully translated and transitioned transnationally. 

Murphy begins her discussion of care by explaining how feminist self-help movements in the United States, Canada, and Europe, “tended to confine its critical interventions to the choreography of clinical techniques and research within women’s health centers or small collectives, believing that their emphasis on flexible, individualized control over clinical encounters could circumvent, by virtue of implicitly accommodating, explicit questions of race, colonialism, and class” (Murphy 720). The medical feminism that shaped so much discussion in the late twentieth century did not question medicine, or care, itself, but rather worked within the existing, predetermined Western Biomedical canon. In doing this, problems associated with this specific rendition of care could be left behind, as when all emphasis is placed on the individual, the systems that individual operates within can be left unchallenged. Murphy’s tentative solution to this, then, is “unsettling” the systems, histories, and institutions that have caused care to become a concept abused by those who uphold racist, sexist, classist, and colonizer medical frameworks. Later, the example of the pap-smear becoming a central issue for some feminists demonstrates the transnational complications that come with this one-sided conceptualization of care; “the analysis of a racialized political economy ‘out there’ did not disrupt the unraced sense that it was better if all women should make themselves available to a technically equitable world of feminist health care ‘in here’” (Murphy 725). The inability to view health care through a lense other than the Western Biomedical one prevents the whole picture from being seen by feminists that are part of the “in here”. This problem of a small health care Overton window extends to women’s healthcare organizations being run by those in positions of power that directly harm “third world” women and running like exploitative multinational corporations. While women in South Africa suffer physical harm due to dangerous conditions in diamond mining, “at the 2007 IWHC [International Women’s Health Coalition] two female members of The De Beers Group, the South African diamond trade titans, were invited to give prominent speeches as supporters and donors” (Murphy 728). The parameters set around healthcare discourse that disregard entirely transnational perspectives severely limits both tangible and intangible health factors of women around the world. 

Davis uses “Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveller” to highlight the ways in which a transnational approach to medicine can be successful, as opposed to the failures of the less transnational approaches described in Murphy’s “Unsettling Care.” As the famous book Our Bodies, Our Selves gained traction across borders, the demand for translations arose. First in Europe, countries like the Netherlands “rejected the division between lesbian and heterosexual relationships as too ‘strict’. It did not fit the Dutch context, nor did it correspond with their own feeling that homosexuality and heterosexuality are a ‘continuum with lots of feelings in between’,” taking a distinctly American book and adapting it to fit their country’s own needs and understandings (Davis 235). In places like Egypt, the version of Our Bodies, Our Selves that suited Egyptian women best was much clearer about its anti-Western medicine stance, as “while the authors support women’s right to have access to all medical knowledge about their bodies and health (the cover of the book shows a young woman with bare arms, western attire and flowing hair peering intently through a microscope), they are also critical of western medicine, which is often authoritarian and disrespectful of women’s needs” (Davis 238). The different approaches taken by each individual locality allowed the book to suit women’s needs globally without building up the fictional character of the “global woman”. 

Although Western Biomedicine is critiqued by even the original American authors, the larger idea of the ability to see possibilities outside of a system that alone makes up all taught and discussed perspectives allowing a far more successful dissemination of feminist praxis, is at the heart of the Davis piece. Western Biomedicine and its shortcomings have failures that go beyond its lack of effectiveness in stopping chronic disease, for example. The acceptance by many, particularly those in the United States, Canada, and Europe, of Western Biomedicine as all that medicine is and can be has stifled not only medical progress but discussion about the role of class, race, and gender in health. This has had consequences globally, for all who fall outside the belief system of Western Biomedicine, typically meaning those most negatively impacted by their class, race, and/or gender, are left out entirely from medicine both in practice and in theory