ABSTRACT
Focusing primarily on Anglo-American clinical medicine, this chapter suggests that such a narrative is quite misleading. It traces concerns over clinical medicine's portrayal of the body and disease as reductive or fragmented. Dissociated portrayals of the body and disease can be traced in medical discourse throughout the twentieth century. On the one hand, they tended to be associated with a depiction of the body as a producer of goods and services. On the other hand, dissociated images also tended to be associated with the portrayal of the body as a consumer of goods and services. After World War II concerns about fragmented portrayals of the body and disease changed as attention focused on what came to be known as the ‘biomedical model.’ For many critics, the biomedical model was sustained by the changes in the post-war organizational structure of medicine.
