Abstract

This chapter explores the topic of medicine and power in the context of race, gender, and class. Beginning with a discussion of quantitative methods of addressing medicine and power, it then examines Michel Foucault’s description of how knowledge/power objectifies human beings by means of dividing practices, scientific classification, and subjectification; John Money’s description of how gender identity is “completely malleable”; Mary Daly’s description of how American gynecology is part of a larger tradition of the social control of women’s bodies and minds; and various issues raised by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Then, with a focus on contemporary research in emergency rooms, it considers some of the challenges facing us in the twenty-first century.