I feel like this author is just selecting facts and hypothesizing motivations to squint a narrative into existence. For example, empires have always existed an

I feel like this author is just selecting facts and hypothesizing motivations to squint a narrative into existence. For example, empires have always existed and feared plagues, which are a big reason for political instability. If not for modern medicine, it's not as though the main criticism that it enables systematic exclusion wouldn't have happened. The author forgets or is ignorant to the fact that the ancients and much of the ancient and medieval world thought that a person's nature comes from the place and climate they grew up in. To the extent that modern medicine enables exclusion, it is much more limited than the ancient conception of it. If this is happening on a larger scale in the past it is because today's states have more control over their citizenry than in the past. > In the Hippocratic text Airs, Waters, Places, the soul is thought of as the place of courage or, as the case may be, its opposite: in the case of lowland inhabitants, courage and endurance are not in their souls by nature, but must be instilled by law (ch. 23); similarly in benign climates, men are fleshy, ill-jointed, moist, without endurance and weak in soul (ch. 24). Perhaps the author should have discussed medicine starting from modern medicine and germ theory. Then the narrative would make more sense, since it seems to be that it is antiquated and racist ideas of health combined with empire that has changed (modern) medicine. Instead, the author tries to portray modern medicine (in contrast with ancient medicine) as a multiplier in enabling exclusion. > emerged a radical idea, for the time: that people would react similarly to a particular medicine regardless of who (noble, poor, free, bound, man, woman, child, rural, urban) or where (Europe, Americas, Asia) they were > The medical revolutions of the next two centuries cloaked these early modern logics in new vocabularies and technologies but did little to displace them from expectations shaping the forms of health care to come. Is this really the case? In my experience as a patient doctors are always aware that symptoms may indicate any number of diseases with any number of treatment plans that need to take into account pre-existing conditions and allergies. > it also enables differences in outcomes to be explained away as natural, physiological, or behavioral rather than byproducts of the violent, unequal circumstances of their development. Those are both legacies of the early modern shift toward viewing people as patients. See: ancient conception of a person's nature. They are legacies of something more ancient than that. It's ironic that on the sidebar is a suggested article that begins like this: > What Is Medicine For? > In place of the hype over personalized medicine, we need a more sober evaluation of the meaning of health and health care.