I very deliberately choose to go to a female gynecologist. First of all because in Austria, medicine is very sexist in a lot of different ways, and it's especially hard for women to become a gynecologist. In Innsbruck, which is the city I studied at and which has a big med faculty, even today no female gynecologist has a contract with the public health care system. That means if you go to a female gynecologist, you have to pay for it yourself and the insurance only covers part of it. That is one reason. Another reason is that, well, I just don't like the idea of a man giving me a gynecologist examination, you know, putting a speculum into my vagina, touching my breast, those things (I'm prude in that sense, I guess). Another reason is that I don't think that a man can actually understand the way in which I feel certain things related to my body. For example, when I say I have pains during my period, how would a man know what that feels like? Sorry to be essentialist that way, but that's just what I think.
Then of course, I think in general being a doctor is one of the most impossible things. Because you cannot actually "understand" the patient's pains in the sense that you cannot feel it in the very moment the patient is feeling ill. The only way of relating to it is that you 1) know your own body and pain and how it is to be ill; 2) you have a sort of "diagnosis questionnaire" that you have to ask the patient in order to categorize the symptoms. For example, you would ask if a certain pain stings, or is more "strechted out" or whatever. But then again, how do you know if what you consider a "stinging pain" is considered a "stinging pain" by another person? So considering that, I think the fact of people actually getting the right medication and getting healed is a real miracle.
I guess it's the whole notion of never being able to get outside "your own skin" and you only have approximate notions of what people feel, and those are negotiated and shaped by conventions. In a totally different sense, it's the same as you never know how a particular person perceives the color blue, you can only know because we have language that arbitrarily made the convention: the color blue is to be called the color blue, and in some sense we all can more or less agree to a certain object having that color. But when other people say "that is blue" and you try to question that, if it's only you not perceiving/calling blue as blue, people will think you have a problem (and maybe put you in a looney bin, ultimately).
It's like when you look at movies from the beginning of cinema: the way I perceive them, is to some extent as being very funny (even if they're not comedies), because they have a lot of what we now consider "technical flaws" that make you very aware of the medium itself, because the acting seems very exaggerated, the make-up too and the props and all those sort of things. But for the people at that time, it didn't look strange in the way it does to us nowadays, it looked "realistic" if you will (but that, again, is only my guess).
Which brings me to Foucault's quotation of Borges Chinese Encyclopedia and the impossibility to think it. Obviously, since I am into historical research right now, that is also a big "problem" of my research. I have no notion of the way people perceived the world, themselves, etc. 200 years ago, other than my present notion of objects, concepts, feelings, etc. The strangeness of historical texts for us today proves, I think, also that we are unable to think or fully understand that text, that we now don't have the same meanings/references/conventions in which a historical texts makes sense in the way it did 200 years ago (obviously, there is enough similarity to understand it in some sense, otherwise historical research would be impossible, like hearing a foreign language you don't know). We only have our frame of reference and "system of intelligibility" to understand a text that was written in a totally different frame of reference. But, coming back to my initial observation, even the present, shared frame of reference doesn't enable you to fully understand other people, because of the unresolvable strangeness and, well, isolation (in lack of a better word) our bodies are.
Then of course, I think in general being a doctor is one of the most impossible things. Because you cannot actually "understand" the patient's pains in the sense that you cannot feel it in the very moment the patient is feeling ill. The only way of relating to it is that you 1) know your own body and pain and how it is to be ill; 2) you have a sort of "diagnosis questionnaire" that you have to ask the patient in order to categorize the symptoms. For example, you would ask if a certain pain stings, or is more "strechted out" or whatever. But then again, how do you know if what you consider a "stinging pain" is considered a "stinging pain" by another person? So considering that, I think the fact of people actually getting the right medication and getting healed is a real miracle.
I guess it's the whole notion of never being able to get outside "your own skin" and you only have approximate notions of what people feel, and those are negotiated and shaped by conventions. In a totally different sense, it's the same as you never know how a particular person perceives the color blue, you can only know because we have language that arbitrarily made the convention: the color blue is to be called the color blue, and in some sense we all can more or less agree to a certain object having that color. But when other people say "that is blue" and you try to question that, if it's only you not perceiving/calling blue as blue, people will think you have a problem (and maybe put you in a looney bin, ultimately).
It's like when you look at movies from the beginning of cinema: the way I perceive them, is to some extent as being very funny (even if they're not comedies), because they have a lot of what we now consider "technical flaws" that make you very aware of the medium itself, because the acting seems very exaggerated, the make-up too and the props and all those sort of things. But for the people at that time, it didn't look strange in the way it does to us nowadays, it looked "realistic" if you will (but that, again, is only my guess).
Which brings me to Foucault's quotation of Borges Chinese Encyclopedia and the impossibility to think it. Obviously, since I am into historical research right now, that is also a big "problem" of my research. I have no notion of the way people perceived the world, themselves, etc. 200 years ago, other than my present notion of objects, concepts, feelings, etc. The strangeness of historical texts for us today proves, I think, also that we are unable to think or fully understand that text, that we now don't have the same meanings/references/conventions in which a historical texts makes sense in the way it did 200 years ago (obviously, there is enough similarity to understand it in some sense, otherwise historical research would be impossible, like hearing a foreign language you don't know). We only have our frame of reference and "system of intelligibility" to understand a text that was written in a totally different frame of reference. But, coming back to my initial observation, even the present, shared frame of reference doesn't enable you to fully understand other people, because of the unresolvable strangeness and, well, isolation (in lack of a better word) our bodies are.
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