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In this book Antonio Lanfranchi critiques the current technological and impersonal faces of medical practice and exhorts us to return to a more personalized, reflective, and eros-infused approach to patient care and self-care.
We have lost our ability for the latter because of the overarching reach of medical technology and its interventions; rather than taking responsibility for our physical and emotional well-being, we have come to rely on medical technology in all its manifestations, antidepressants, cosmetic surgery, ‘preventive wellness’, appetite suppressants, empires of exercise, to keep us youthful and vigorous and to fend off the spectres of old age and death.
How did we get here? In part, according to Lanfranchi, by way of the gradual evolution of medicine from its Greek origins, in which the discipline originally moved along a continuum between the rational, Apollonian pole of austerity and power and the instinctual, Dionysian pole of generativity, frenzy, and dismemberment, to its present state as a rigid rational structure. Medicine is now an Apollonian art, hardly an art at all, according to the author.
Lanfranchi begins his book with a lengthy and at times breathless exposition of the Asclepian myth. Apollo's son, Asclepius, was cut from the womb of his mother, whom Apollo killed in a fit of jealous anger. Asclepius was not a god, but a mortal and a hero who was condemned to death by Zeus for bringing Hippolytus back to life and thereby interfering in the divine law of the Fates.
The Asclepius complex, ‘an identification with a superhuman power of life and death, and thus a consequent psychic inflation’ is a critical part of Lanfranchi's thesis (p. 26). Modern medicine and 21st century physicians are caught in a massive Asclepius complex. We redeem life by denying death, and an inflation born primarily of technology's ability to circumvent death has led to a sense of omnipotence, of crossing the boundary of death. The heroic stance that is necessary to