Making Live or Letting Die: Medicine under the Spell of Politics.

Abstract

Establishing health policies during times of emergency has always been crucial to try to limit the death toll. Today as in the past, people fear that doctors are involuntarily acting wrong, questioning their abilities and expertise. What should society do when its components distrust medical authority and its provisions, when this feeling is deeply rooted in the masses? This thesis will tackle the issue on two different grounds: the first part of the work will discuss biopolitical matters starting from a Foucauldian point of view, the latter will be about some important historical examples linked to the history of Venice, that were not analyzed by Foucault, exemplifying important aspects that emerge from the relation of health politics and forms of domination. Scholars like Canguilhem and Basaglia will enrich the discussion on how a subject can be considered to be either normal or pathological and the extent to which such an evaluation depends on changing societal constraints. I will try to underline throughout the whole work how the willingness to save a patient’s life is often an arbitrary decision, sometimes merely political, or a compound of medicine and politics. In the conclusion, I am going to show how the relationship between power and medicine is everlasting: I will be looking for patterns that can also help the contemporary citizen predict shifts and changes in the so-called normality. If medicine aims to elongate human life and to improve its quality, is it only because we are considered useful for society?