Medicine: The Ethics of Care, the Subject of Experiment

So, finally, what is medicine? The question is so compelling precisely because there is no way exhaustively to answer it. It will remain open-ended because, as these six articles demonstrate, medicine itself is open-ended. The apparent disparities in their fields of concern sports medicine, clinical trials, gerontology, military-strategic uses of medicine, animal models are indicative of the flexible ways medicine maps itself onto other domains and lends itself to varying, often conflicting social uses. In these articles, we can see medical knowledge and therapeutic practices enrolled in various kinds of market formation (bottled water, pharmacology), subjectification (fitness, ageing) and military administration (the Occupied Palestinian Territory), as well as in the more expected practices of clinical and experimental research. These examples of medical hybridity could be multiplied indefinitely, given the thorough diffusion of clinical and public health, forensics and biomedical innovation through the social body. However, multiplying examples will not necessarily help to elucidate the reasons for medicines impressive traction, its ability to modulate and organize the varieties of lifes unfolding, to use Brett Neilson's term. What do these articles and their particular topics tell us about such traction? Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd