Body—Mind Expertise: Notes on the Polarization of Health Care Discourse

Abstract

The argument of this chapter is that it is possible to identify a politics of expertise in current debates about health care, and that this politics is bound up with a view of the relation between mind and body which is still inherently Cartesian. To illustrate this theme, I shall focus initially on the rhetoric associated with ‘new’ nursing, turning to the contrast with medicine in the second half. I shall be making much of what we may legitimately call nursing’s ‘rediscovery of the mind’, which I think can be regarded as a solution to two related problems. In the first place, it functions as an academic ideology supporting the discipline’s recent arrival in the university sector through Project 2000. Second, it articulates a division of labour vis-à-vis medicine, whereby the body is assigned to the medical profession, while the mind becomes the province of nursing. However, it is clear that, despite the discourse of professional autonomy, medicine remains the dominant partner, and that the latent function of nursing is still to co-opt the patient into the most recent version of the ‘medical model’, the mind being (as it were) simply the point of entry.