For one of my final projects, I am reading Emily Martin’s book Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture frorm the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS. It’s a facinating read. Her text looks at the implications of medical authority, science as a social process, and our relationship to our bodies. I found this quote particularly insightful:

As I trace the shape of the bodily landscape on either side of the divide, we will find that sometimes the two sides coexist in tension with each other, the way a traveler’s memory of past experiences can inform his or her experiences of the present. In our technical everyday concepts and practices concerning health and the body, the old landscape on the far side of the divide lives on, called into salience from time to time by a variety of new circumstances met on the near side.