Why is it that whenever the medical institution is vilified I attempt unconditionally to defend it? Perhaps it is because I am a pre-med student, one who will study until the wee hours of the night for eight years just to gain a degree that gives her qualification to cut people open (sick, right?). Of course the system has its flaws, but doesn’t every system? Where would we be today without the medical institution, without science, without the constant need to classify everything? Isn’t it within human nature to do just that, classify and pathologize?
Kessler and McKenna, in Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, state,
Scientists construct dimorphism where there is continuity. Hormones, behavior, physical characteristics, developmental processes, chromosomes, psychological qualities have all been fixed into [sex or] gender dichotomous categories. Scientific knowledge does not inform the answer to “what makes a person either a man or a woman?” Rather it justifies (and appears to give ground for) the already existing knowledge that a person is either a woman or a man and that there is no problem differentiating between the two. Biological, psychological, and social differences do not lead to our seeing two genders. Our seeing two genders leads to the “discovery” of biological, psychological, and social difference (163).
So therefore each characteristic (biological, psychological, or social) fits (or could we say is tailored to fit?) into a preexisting category that is socially constructed. Because it is human nature to classify everything, does that make it wrong to do so? I suppose it is if it renders a group of people oppressed. I find it interesting that it is the medical institution that is blamed in cases such as this. The socially constructed categories came first and the medical institution is merely working within the preexisting system which was around much longer than modern medicine.
Medicine is a very rudimentary science as sciences go. We still treat the symptoms. We have no understanding of what causes disease, and what we don’t know, we automatically deem abnormal. What dictates whether a person is going to have diabetes? Sure, a diet high in sugar and fat give individuals a higher propensity for the disease but how do we know someone will get it before they do? Compared to other sciences, we know so little. We will always know what the velocity of a ball falling off of a building will be right before it hits the ground, but we will never know if a child will grow up to have diabetes until it actually happens and once it does, that person is then abnormal, pathologized, different.
Homosexuality was different in the 1940s, the time that D’Emilio, in Homosexuality and American Society: An Overview, states that the medical institution came to pay attention to the gays. D’Emilio states, “Increasingly, Americans came to view human sexual behavior as either healthy or sick, with homosexuality falling into the latter category…In the postwar era, medicine was moving toward parity with religion and law in structuring American culture’s perception of homosexuality” (17). As I asked previously, can you fault the medical institution for simple ignorance? It is still, in many ways, an ignorant science. Medicine works within the social framework attempting to classify and fix. I’m not saying this is in any way right since millions and millions of people were and still are being oppressed, abused and killed due to this unfortunate social construct that inundates society. Obviously not everything needs fixing or is even broken at all. I just find it problematic to fault an institution that aims to cure and better the lives of everyone it can. To end I will quote a portion of the Hippocratic Oath, “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.” While the medical institution has done unimaginable harm in perpetuating the culture that deemed homosexuals as deviants, I can only assume/hope that the institution had and still has good intentions.
1 comments:
An interesting defense. Of course, medicine, like all human institutions, is falliable. Where your defense may differ from people like Young or D'Emilio is in the effects of that scientific vulnerability to subjectivity. One of the things that is going on in their work is unbuilding the scientific edifice of objective knowledge, which is all about the perfection of scientific knowledge over all others (which are considered subjective).
However, science is in practice as subjective as any other human practice, although perhaps less so in some cases. This isn't to say one doesn't believe in antibiotics or germ theory. Rather, it is to note, in a curious way echoed by your quotation of Kessler and McKenna (nice, btw). How do we create realities? How do they become grounded, or naturalized? Medicine is the dominant paradigm of the late 19th and 20th centuries because it claims/steals the omniscience of objective knowledge, but also assumes the moral power of law and religion. What D'Emilio and Young seek to do is question that omniscience.
And, in some ways, medicine has responded constructively to these challenges. In so far as medicine reflects/ed the society that surrounded it in a particular place and time, it is no more or less responsible than law or religion in the pathological charaterization of LGBT folks. But old attitudes and preconceptions die hard (something we will return to in our discussion of HIV/AIDS).
BTW, are you familiar with the work of Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding? You might find some of it interesting...
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