Annemarie Mol

In The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Annemarie Mol uses incidences of the disease atherosclerosis at a Dutch hospital to examine the manner in which doctors, patients, and the healthcare system construct different meanings of the body and disease. Mol writes, “This is a book about the way medicine enacts the objects of its concern and treatment” (pg. vii). In setting her book in the larger literature, Mol contributes “to theorizing medicine’s ontological politics: a politics that has to do with the way in which problems are framed, bodies are shaped, and lives are pushed and pulled into one shape or another” (pg. viii). Finally, her work “draws on a variety of literatures: in philosophy, anthropology, science and technology studies, feminist theory, sociology, political theory” (pg. ix). While the title refers to the body, Mol argues, “The body, the patient, the disease, the doctor, the technician, the technology: all of these are more than one. More than singular” (pg. 5). Bodies alternate between collections of organs and sentient people; doctors code switch depending on the task at hand and their audience; and even the technology varies depending on how a doctor, technician, or patient will use it and what they intend to derive from it.
Mol writes, “In addition to disease, the object of biomedicine, something else is of importance too, a patient’s illness. Illness here stands for a patient’s interpretation of his or her disease, the feelings that accompany it, the life events it turns into” (pg. 9). This leads her to argue, “Atherosclerosis enacted is more than one – but less than many. The body multiple is not fragmented. Even if it is multiple, it also hangs together” (pg. 55). Patients display different systems, visit the doctor with different complaints, require different treatments or tests, so that the disease and its treatment take on multiple forms. In one of her best examples of the way the body changes depending on the audience, Mol writes, “Surgeons do not see blood. Or they may see a lot of blood while they operate, but they try not to. They try to keep as much of it inside the vascular system as possible. Hematologists, on the other hand, don’t see patients” (pg. 110). Both may work with the same body, but it differs depending on their goals and perception.… (mais)