The Distressed Body ─ Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing

Returning to some of the issues in his now classic book The Absent Body published by this Press in 1990, philosopher and physician Drew Leder turns his attention in his new book to distressed bodies the experience of illness and pain, and a variety of medical responses thereto; the experience of being imprisoned in our age of mass incarceration”; and also the mis-treatment of animal bodies, as in modern factory farms. Yet this book is not just about suffering, but the healing of suffering. Each chapter takes up a single topic -- be it the experience of pain, the use of pills in medicine, organ transplantation, or factory farming employing interpretive tools appropriate to the issue. At the same time, the book clarifies for the reader how each chapter connects to and builds upon previous material. After a general Introduction, the book’s first section is called Illness and Treatment: Phenomenological Investigations.” It uses phenomenological methods, largely, though not exclusively, to examine what is it to be ill or in pain, and how modern medicine does and could -- respond. This leads us into Section Two of the book, Medicine and Bioethics: Hermeneutical Reflections.” In this section, Leder uses tools explicitly and implicitly drawn from figures like Heidegger and Gadamer. Up to now the focus has been on the ill body and its treatment by the medical system. But this is far from the only sort of distressed body.” In Section Three, Discarded and Recovered Bodies” Leder reveals striking parallels between the lifeworlds of animals and prisoners. This stunning collection of essays showcases Leder’s powerful and imaginative intellect.

Drew Leder is an M.D. and professor of Western and Eastern philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author or editor of many books, includingThe Body in Medical Thought and Practice and The Absent Body, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.