The Patient as Text

A commonly-held model of the doctor-patient relationship casts it as a subject/object relationship: broadly the patient is a 'text', and the doctor the reader or interpreter of that text. However, recent critical models preset notions of text and reader as complex and unstable, and the relationship of doctor and patient as similarly complicated. Explorations of psychiatry and 'madness' by critics such as Michel Foucault present a further background of complex ideological change. In The Patient a