Abstract
This essay argues that Berger and Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (1967) – comprising social observation and photographs of the rural practitioner, Dr. Sassall and his patients – enacts an embodied, intersubjective empathy called “pain-work.” The book enacts “pain-work” through two strategies. Firstly, by conflating three ways of seeing – Berger’s observation, Mohr’s photography, and Sassall’s medical gaze – it shows that the clinical encounter embodies objective vision through intersubjective pain. Secondly, it employs the concepts of recognition and witnessing to show how the subjectivity of the physician is distributed in his community. Thus, Berger and Mohr witness Sassall’s witnessing of his patients; even as Sassall and his patients are constituted intersubjectively, so too are Berger, Mohr, and Sassall.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the late Jean Mohr for his lovely photographs from A Fortunate Man, a few of which are reproduced here under fair use. Thanks to Scott Stonington for giving feedback on a very early version of this paper. A subsequent version was presented on the “Viewing Pain, Experiencing Pain” panel at the “Embodying Vision, Envisioning Embodiment” Conference at the University of Michigan, October 17-19, 2019. Many thanks to the respondent Tyler Whitney for his critiques and suggestions. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the first draft of this article for their very valuable feedback. Finally, a note of gratitude to June Howard for introducing me to A Fortunate Man.
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1 It is important to note that Foucault’s study is limited to eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For studies of ocularcentrism in medicine beyond Foucault and as it relates to visual technologies of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (1995), in which she analyzes how the visual technology of cinema was used in medicine to “analyze, regulate, and reconfigure the transient, uncontrollable field of the body” (xiii). For a less theoretical and more conventionally historical examination of vision and medical technology, see Stanley Reiser’s Medicine and the Reign of Technology (1978) which follows the development of medical technology from the seventeenth century to twentieth. He argues that with the invention of the ophthalmoscope, laryngoscope, and X-ray toward the end of the nineteenth century, physicians began to consider vision as superior to the other senses for diagnostic purposes. One physician concluded that medicine was “gradually relegating hearing to a lower intellectual plane than sight” (quoted in Reiser, 68).
2 Also see Oliver’s engagement with vision in her earlier work, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001). She argues that so much of both the defense and denigration of vision in Western philosophy is predicated on a false presumption of vision as “distance,” i.e. that in order to recognize objects properly we must place them at a certain length from our eyes. This notion is in turn based on another faulty assumption: that the distance between the beholder and the beheld is empty space. Using psychologist J. J. Gibson’s notion of “ecological optics” and philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Oliver argues that spatial distance, replete with vibrations, photons, energies, is in fact “thick with the flesh of the world” (201), making our selves continuous with others’. This would seem to suggest that Sassall’s clinical gaze is not “detached” but of a piece with the subjectivities of his patients, the result of “touching eyes” (198) which do not merely see but feel the pain of his patients. This is also similar to Barthes’s point about the rays of the photographed body touching him.
3 Also see Donna McCormack’s Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (2014), in which she argues that the privileging of vision above the other senses is in fact a typically colonial attitude, and she advocates for a witnessing that uses “multisensory epistemologies” (27).
4 Anthropologists such as Peter Redfield have employed the term modest witness to examine the activities of doctors in medical humanitarian organizations like Medicin Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, who enshrine the practice of témoignage (witnessing, outspoken advocacy for oppressed peoples) in their charter. In one article, “A less modest witness” (2006) he argues that the modest testimony of the gentleman-scientist undergoes a shift toward collective advocacy in organizations like MSF. The physician in MSF combines technical expertise with public testimony to produce matters of fact as matters of ethical concern and vice versa. Redfield terms this unexpected phenomenon “‘motivated truth’ to highlight the overt combination of reason and sentiment that it represents” (2006, 5). Physicians like Sassall not on the frontlines in conflict zones but in less visible, “unfortunate” places seem to enact a similar ethic of “motivated truth” through pain-work.
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Sidiki, B. Doctored Images: Enacting “Pain-Work” in John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (1967). J Med Humanit 42, 777–793 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09671-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09671-1