From iatrogenic harm to iatrogenic violence: corruption and the end of medicine

This paper seizes Ivan Illich's recurring notion of corruption to reflect on medicine's immanent spiral of maleficence. For Illich, the institutionalization of any 'good' necessarily corrupts it, and the institutionalization of health and care under the tutoring hand of medicine has produced counterproductive consequences on every plane. The paper explores the nemetic character of contemporary biomedicine - whose growth in technique has meant a corresponding growth in its capacity for corruption and harm - in an autoethnographic project that apprises and names the escalation from iatrogenic harm to iatrogenic violence that the author discovered at two UK hospitals in 2014. In January, she went to the hospital for a colonoscopy; in November, she finally left, disabled and unmade. In the interim, she suffered infection, sepsis, pneumonia, cardiac arrest, and - worst of all - a factitious psychiatrizing diagnosis embedded in spiralling loops of iatrogenic harm. By reflecting critically on this experience, interlocuting personal memory and writings with doctors' inscribed notes and insights from medical anthropology, the paper elucidates an iatrogenic spiral, showing how unknowable bodies pose an insurmountable epistemic and existential challenge to medicine's technic mandate, how medicine locates and uses an 'epistemic escape valve' in the face of such challenges, and how snowballing nosocomial harm escalates into brutality and vice. The argument, in short, is that iatrogenic violence (destructive, subjective or agentic, and intentional) is the natural endpoint of iatrogenic harm (destructive but objective or systemic, and unintentional).