Ivan Illich and medical nemesis

Medical Nemesis 40 years on: the enduring legacy of Ivan Illich.

Ivan Illich's attack on modern medicine, Medical Nemesis, appeared in 1974. The book famously opened with the statement: 'The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.' Forty years after its publication, this paper examines the major themes of the book, and asks whether events since its publication have added weight to Illich's thesis.

Lessons from Ivan Illich.

Almost 30 years have passed since the initial publication of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. A medieval historian who has been described as one of the world’s great thinkers, Illich introduced his iconoclastic work with the indictment, “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” The book makes a passing reference to radiology ...

Medical nemesis?

The medicalization of life.

Two contributions from Dr Ivan Illich follow. The first, in which he sets out his primary thesis of the medicalization of life, is a section from Dr Illich's book 'Medical Nemesis'. (It is reprinted with the permission of the author and his publishers, Messrs Calder and Boyars.) The second is a transcript of the paper which Dr Illich read at the conference organized by the London Medical Group ...

Evaluation: salvation or nemesis of medical informatics?

The currently prevailing paradigms of evaluation in medical/health informatics are reviewed. Some problems with application of the objectivist approach to the evaluation of real-rather than simulated-(health) information systems are identified. The rigorous application of the objectivist approach, which was developed for laboratory experiments, is difficult to adapt to the evaluation of informa...