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Short abstract:

My contribution seeks to offer preliminary reflections on my project on ‘rebel doctors’, conceived as medical practitioners who, in experimenting with new modes of knowing and doing health, test the boundaries of textbook medicine and established assumptions of good care.

Long abstract:

As a medical-doctor-turned-social-scientist, social science critiques of medicine’s ‘tenacious assumptions’ (Gordon 1988) that reduce people to patients, health problems to clearly identifiable pathologies, and individual bodies to obstacles to the identification of generic disease and application of standardised treatments have long instinctively resonated with my own frustrations about the exceedingly narrow epistemological and ontological frameworks meant to guide clinical practice. And yet, such critiques arguably also discount the long history of medical ‘countercultures’ that emerged in response to the field’s perceived progressive reductionism (e.g.Lawrence and Weisz 1998; Saks 2002; Hoffman 1989; Greco 2019), as well as the pockets of resistance that persist within biomedicine today. As such, they risks closing down opportunities for constructive interdisciplinary engagement that explores how things might indeed be otherwise.

My project on ‘rebel doctors’ asks what we might learn from the spaces of creative subversion, visionary activism and playful experimentation that exist within contemporary biomedicine. What are the limits of textbook medicine that practitioners experience, and what are the knowledges, practices and technologies that they employ to expand their repertoires of care? What are the imaginaries of an alternative medicine that are articulated in these practices? In how might we, as Isabelle Stengers (2023) proposes, try and ‘make sense in common’ with rebel practitioners who take up the pragmatic challenge of figuring out what ‘good’ medicine might entail?