Homeopathy And Women
Over the course of the past several decades feminist scholars, in company with medical historians, have developed a sophisticated framework for identifying the ways in which Western medicine, as a system of social control, tends to reproduce and legitimate the construction of gender in the wider society. Wielded by physicians holding positions of power, the notion that "anatomy is destiny" can become a potent ideological weapon, labelling actions that violate "natural law" as unhealthy and their perpetrators as unsound. For the most part these critical inquiries have not bothered to distinguish biomedicine from alternative healing traditions, the latter having been regarded until recently ...
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19-th century American homeopath. Kent himself would never have used the word "alternative" for his personal brand of homeopathy, which he presumed was blessed by God; but with the distance that time affords, we can permit ourselves to use the term as a convenient approximation, recognizing that there was more social overlap and shared ideology linking mainstream with periphery than either sector in those days could allow.
In any discussion of 19th-century homeopathy Kent's name would invariably be mentioned, whether in his role as a brilliant clinician, a prolific writer, or an influential teacher. Yet Kent, as a privileged male professional, was also thoroughly representative of his own times. Kent articulated a set of beliefs about gender that can be fairly summarized as "androcentric."1
If confronted (as he may well have been by the female students of his inner circle), Kent would likely have relinquished some of these beliefs as so much cultural debris. But in other ...
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therefore concerns the way in which various civil institutions, such as the prison, the asylum, and the clinic, serve the state in accomplishing its ends. From this perspective the practice of medicine itself becomes problematic, because medicine, though basically noncoercive, possesses formidable technologies that can promote submission to standards which it defines as normative. With medicine, more than other civic institutions, the normative function is easily dissembled as a concern for the sick, so that in a typical medical encounter both client and practitioner are likely to experience "keenly felt gratifications, which mask elements of ideology and social control that are present ...
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Homeopathy And Women. (2006, May 10). Retrieved December 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Homeopathy-And-Women/45678
"Homeopathy And Women." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 10 May. 2006. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Homeopathy-And-Women/45678>
"Homeopathy And Women." Essayworld.com. May 10, 2006. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Homeopathy-And-Women/45678.
"Homeopathy And Women." Essayworld.com. May 10, 2006. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Homeopathy-And-Women/45678.
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