The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice Book

A great book where Annemarie Mol questions not the epistemological approaches to atherosclerosis, but rather looks at the multiple ontologies of atherosclerosis made in different sites across a hospital. It does a great job of answering and demonstrating how a single object, like the body (not bodies), can be multiple and still hang together (a question that Lisa Blackman also asks). To me it really demonstrates an analogous example of the 2 slit experiment Karen Barad discusses, where the electron is diffracted, dispersed, and multiple (like the body), until a which-slit detector is used (or perhaps an angiogram in this case, or even a doppler). I think Vicki Kirby's work on representation and the figure could add a bit more nuance to her conceptualization of representations of atherosclerosis v. atherosclerosis itself. Overall great book that demonstrates what theory looks like in practice and how valuable it is, and how despite the endless controversy about diseases, what they are, and what causes them - in practice we don't see often see bursts of arguments about what to do, life is able to go on regardless of contradiction, and this book explains how.