ABSTRACT
I experience myself as embodied, incorporated, incarnated in my body. To appear in my own person is to evidence this implication of my self in my body.
Medical examinations threaten this embodied self with untoward intimacies. The accoutrements of propriety are stripped away: I appear in nothing but my body. What follows has the structure of a transgression, an infringement, but one in which I am complicit. I disclose my body to the other, the stranger, the physician (see Berger and Mohr 1976: 68). To deflect this threat to the embodied self, medicine constitutes a separate realm in which the body as lodgement of the self is transformed into the body as object of scrutiny: persons become patients.
