Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (review)

In 1994, the annual meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values was held in Pittsburgh. This is often referred to as the “mega-meeting,” for it was held jointly with the Society for Bioethics Consultation and the American Association of Bioethics. Because there were no physical altercations between the members of the three groups, the meeting eventually resulted in the formation of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. At one point during that weekend I was persuaded to play hooky and go visit the Andy Warhol museum, which had recently opened. I must confess that my primary motivation was more to be relieved of endless encounters with tweed jackets than any particular interest in an artist I thought of as simply a practitioner of pop art. After touring the museum, I was impressed with the range and depth of Warhol’s insight into issues of contemporary culture and representation, but I made no association between his art and the presentations I had attended during the conference. However, after reading David Morris’s book Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, I have come to suspect that the conference should have taken place in that museum.

Morris begins his analysis of illness in our time with a detailed examination of Warhol’s life and work. Morris observes how Warhol presented himself as part of a “heroin-chic” lifestyle yet, paradoxically, rarely actually engaged in the life his image portrayed. While appearing unwell, Warhol led a relatively healthy life, and it is this odd contrast between representation and reality that makes Warhol such an apt figure with which to begin an examination of the particular postmodern condition of contemporary illness. Morris argues that Warhol’s mysterious death following complications from a routine surgical removal of his gallbladder was also a profoundly postmodern way to die—in a high tech environment and due to an iatrogenic illness.

Warhol’s medical biography parallels his artistic work in the way it typifies our postmodern age. He rejected the modernist aesthetic in favor of one that dissolved the distinction between high and low culture and explored the consumerism of the art world. Because of this, Morris argues, Warhol’s work reflects “the emergence of a new, postmodern, postindustrial consumer-culture economy in which no aspect of life would be left untouched by the power of images, including the life of the body” (p. 29).

Morris is quite aware of the dangers of explicitly employing an infamous term like postmodern, but he believes it to be “useful in identifying the relatively coherent period in the development of Westernized industrial nations that begins, roughly, at the end of World War II” (p. 7). Thus, Morris uses the term postmodernism simply to designate a particular shift in the zeitgeist of Western civilization, and by using it in this way, he escapes having to provide an all-encompassing and confining definition. Postmodern illness, according to Morris, entails a radical shift in the modernist concept of sickness as a purely biological entity that can be separated from culture and subjectivity. It is necessary—as Morris does—to distinguish his concept of postmodern illness from George Engel’s biopsychosocial model. For all its renowned revolutionary critique of the biomedical model that continues to dominate Western allopathic medicine, in actual practice Engel’s concept has been used as if these (bio-psycho-social) were separate domains of human experience. Morris wishes instead to inject Engel’s initial insight with “two decades of postmodern thinking” (p. 73) and states his thesis bluntly: “Postmodern illness is fundamentally biocultural—always biological and always cultural—situated at the crossroads of biology and culture” (p. 71). The term biocultural emphasizes the inseparability of biology and culture and thereby problematizes the distinction—which has become a critical aspect of the rhetoric of the medical humanities—between disease (the biological) and illness (the patient’s experience).

Morris’s style of analysis, like that of the...