Ivan Illich was perhaps the best known and most damning of the critics that protested the hegemony of medicine in the 1960s and 70s. Illich, who was trained as a Roman Catholic priest, published one of the most pointed critiques of medicine- his Medical Nemesis - published in 1975, which warned of the dangers of the medicalisation of everyday life and introduced the world to the notion of iatrogenesis: illness or injury caused by medical treatment. Illich’s social criticism covered many different areas of life - medicine, schooling, institutions more generally - each of which bound to the others by a similarly radical distaste for elitism and professionalisation, the institutionalisation of knowledge, and the increasing lack of agency and control that industrialisation and technocracy had brought to regular people. Here, a talk to mark the launch of Medical Nemesis in late 1974.
