Reviews for The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice

The average rating for The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-13 00:00:00 Dale Blair Perhaps a foreign concept to many (as it certainly was to me), Mol's aim is for an ethnography of disease, specifically as it is enacted through various modes of interactions among various agents, with the subsequent result being a multiplicity of different (potential) realities to this singular object we have come to call "atherosclerosis." However, rather than being a trivial exercise in semantics, her argument builds up to an activist tone toward the end, posing questions that can perhaps guide us toward a view of health and disease with a reintroduction of the subject, and shifting toward an (re)inclusion of one's knowledge of their own body, distinct from the structures of knowledge opposed from the power-structures overhead. Although some may feel compelled to shy away from the subtext that runs throughout the entire length of the book, I really found her arguments to be more coherent by trading off section by section from subtext to main narrative.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-07 00:00:00 Glenn Ritter 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.