Modern bodies

“Nineteenth-century case studies indicated a transition from this prescientific point of view to a more objective, more modern sense of the body – for patients and for doctors. . . . at the same time patients were influencing the emergence of disease concepts in the doctor-patient dialogue, physicians were instructing patients about medicalized bodies. . . . The doctor-patient dialogue in which biosocial-psychological illnesses were diagnosed and treated was also a site for the creation of a discrete, manageable body (Theriot, 361). . . . In the taking of the history, in the solicitation of symptoms, in the questioning about menstrual irregularities, doctors contributed to the dissociation of body and self. Based on a growing clinical knowledge . . . physicians instructed their patients on the ‘norms’ of the body even as patients’ reporting became part of the data establishing those norms. Patients and their families and friends learned to pay attention to and report changes in appetite, bowel functioning, and menstrual flow; and they learned that any pain was a significant sign of something. . . They were learning a new way to distance themselves from the body, to observe the body, ‘tell’ the body, and act on the body. . . . they were learning to regard the body in a way previous generations of women had not: as discrete, objectifiable, observable; as having a knowable rule-observing interior. As they negotiated about granting speculum exams, wearing pessaries, ending lactation, submitting to restrictions of diet and activity, they were learning that the lived-body was also a fact-to-be-reported and an entity-to-be-examined. Its operation was analyzable and understandable” (362).