ABSTRACT
The history of medicine can be read as hopeful and progressive, as an ever-greater portrait of the body and its conditions (e.g., see Porter 1988, 224-226). It can also be understood as the recurring failure of clinical certainty and the limits of successive medical models of health and disease, of life and death. From the theory of humors to that of miasmatic disease to one informed by bacteriology (and virology), medical theory has diagnosed and prescribed on the basis of ideas that seemed self-evident at the time but were eventually shown to be insufšcient. It is not simply, as Foucault (1973) famously argued, that medicine is socially constructed and value-laden rather than a simple statement of value-free, external realities. It is that at every stage of our knowing we šll in continents of our ignorance with still limited knowledge and general suppositions, assuming their sufšciency.
