>> As to your portrayal of the "ideology of western science" - I am
>> sorry, but
>> this is a caricature, a straw man. I challenge you to find a scientist,
>> medical or otherwise, whose stated research objective is "to
>> disarticulate
>> the body and treat one part as if it existed in isolation from the other
>> parts," let alone "essentialize and universalize the subject of
>> medicine."
>
Woj,
As for the disarticulation, that's not a research objective it is THE method of western science. That's why ecology was such a revolution. But, to give one minor side example with significant consequences: it was argued that women should not breastfeed because "formula" had all the ingredients of mother's milk. Wrong.
As for the essentializing/universalizing the subject of medicine, just off the top of my head:
1. It was "discovered" LAST YEAR that the protocol for diagnosing and treating heart attacks was developed entirely based on male patients and that it was not very useful for women. For example, men experience heart attacks as pain in the chest or arm; women experience it as heartburn. Therefore when women go to the ER with "heartburn," they are sent home where they proceed to die from heart attacks. There are further details about different treatment protocols. But I'll stop here. You should look it up.
2. Somebody realized, oh, twenty years ago, that ALL of Piaget's testing and foundational work on the development of children's learning was based on experiments on boys. Now Piaget was a smart and creative scientist, but it never ocurred to him that limiting his testing to boys was, indeed, a limit. That is not a reflection of Piaget; it is a reflection of the Scientific Model that you worship and whose assumptions, I am arguing, must be questioned.
3. I just recently read this, but I don't remember where, that a woman MD recollected questioning (when she was in med school) why all experiments were done on men. She was told that women's hormonal cycles (hormones are powerful motherfuckers) would disrupt the data -- so that made them bad test subjects. She accepted this as a reasonable argument.
There are all kinds of ways that our cultural baggage becomes enmeshed in our "neutral" science. This baggage determines both our certitude that science is perfectly netural as well as all the ways that it is not.
Joanna