Shane Doyle, Before HIV: Sexuality, Fertility and Mortality in East Africa, 1900-1980, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 2013), pp. 450, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs, £90, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-19-726533-8.
نویسنده
چکیده
researched. Medical science did not exist in a culture-free vacuum; nor was culture impervious to psychiatric ideas. Di Marco recognises the mutual constitution of medicine and culture to an extent, but makes normative judgements about the medical sciences. Consider her repeated use of the metaphor of contamination. She contends that the medical narrative was ‘contaminated’ by nationalistic discourse, making it ‘inconsistent’ and ‘lack[ing] scientific integrity’ (7). Psychiatric theories indirectly ‘reinvigorated’ the cultural narrative, Di Marco argues, because they were ‘fragmented’, ‘confused’ and ‘dissonant’ (123). She implies that psychiatry could have overpowered the cultural narrative of suicide if it had remained ‘purely’ scientific. To imagine that psychiatry was ever ‘uncontaminated’ by culture seems naïve at best, dangerous at worst. Nor did all narratives of suicide in the twentieth century fit neatly into the categories of medicine or culture. Di Marco’s close analyses of sensationalised cases of suicide in the national press across the twentieth century suggest that individuals with experiences of suicide and attempted suicide crafted their own language and stories to make sense of their desire to die. Many left behind suicide letters, diaries and confessions that the popular press eagerly disseminated. Tracing the alternative narratives that appeared in such writings may have helped lessen the reductive quality found in the opposition of medicine and culture, a feature that mars this otherwise well-researched book.
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