Liberation medicine : past, present, and future

Abstract

In her book Death Without Weeping (1992), Nancy Scheper-Hughes coined the term “liberation medicine,” which aims to place the individual experience of illness in a larger social context and use it as a starting point for critical thinking and resistance. Illness, so the basic premise of liberation medicine, is a form of resistance that can be turned into an effective political strategy. Accordingly, medicine is understood to have the potential for a “critical practice of freedom” that can create spaces for patients and medical staff in which new ways of dealing with human suffering are negotiated. Taking Scheper-Hughes’s reflections as a starting point, this editorial introduction to the special section conceptually develops the notion of liberation medicine, outlines how it relates to similar concepts and debates, and sketches what it might mean in the contemporary era. We argue that radically rethinking health and health care is a powerful way to rethink, and change, society at large. In this sense, we understand liberation medicine, following Wilder (2022), as a “concrete utopia.”