The Biomedical Empire

Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Barbara Katz Rothman

• Publisher: Stanford Briefs
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781503614819
• eBook ISBN: 9781503629882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—drivers of our access to basic goods and services—rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire, making it one of the largest economic forces in the world. Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power: economic leverage, the faith of its citizens, and governmental rule. She investigates the Western colonial underpinnings of the empire and its rapid intrusion into everyday life, focusing on the realms of birth and death. This provides her with a powerful vantage point from which to critically examine the current moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the power structures of the empire in unprecedented ways while sparking the most visible resistance it has ever seen.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A Moment of Crisis
• 2. A Sociologist Walks into a Pandemic . . .
• 3. Bringing Medical Sociology into the 21st Century
• 4. The Three Elements of an Empire
• 5. What Have We Lost? Where Did the Care Go?
• 6. The Land of the Sick
• 7. Death and Dying as Seen Through the Lens of COVID-19
• 8. The Other Gate: Birth in the Time of COVID-19
• 9. The Empire Strikes Back
• 10. Lessons Learned
• Notes