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Health Care Anal (2013) 21:306322 DOI 10.1007/s10728-013-0264-1
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Nietzsche, Illness and the Bodys Quest for Narrative
Peter R. Sedgwick
Published online: 13 September 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract This paper explores Nietzsches approach to the question of illness. It develops an account of Nietzsches ideas in the wake of Arthur W. Franks discussion of the shortcomings of modern medicine and narrative theory. Nietzsches approach to illness is then explored in the context of On the Genealogy of Morality and his conception of the human being as the sick animal. This account, it is argued, allows for Nietzsche to develop a conception of suffering that refuses to reduce it to modernist restitutive conceptions of well-being. Instead, Nietzsche advocates a more nuanced conception of varying degrees of health. This, it is argued, can be developed into a model that allows for a more satisfying conception of the relation between medical practitioner and patient.
Keywords Nietzsche Health Suffering Illness Modern medicine
Postmodernism Selfhood Narrative Dementia
[W]hat is it to us that Herr Nietzsche has become well again?1
Suffering Thought
Few philosophers can be said to have a closer relationship with illness than Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900). As Walter Kaufmann relates, school records describe the teenage Nietzsche as shortsighted and often plagued by migraine headaches.2 Subsequent afictions followed him through his life and ultimately
1 Nietzsche [13], Preface for the second edition, section 2.
2 Kaufmann [6], p. 23.
P. R. Sedgwick (&)
ENCAP, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected]
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concluded it: extreme illness forced Nietzsche into retiring from the University of Basel in 1879, and in January 1889 while in Turin he suffered a catastrophic collapse which robbed him of his sanity.3 What makes Nietzsches relationship to illness especially interesting, however, is its overt presence in his writings. The text that is often regarded as signalling the beginning of his mature thought, Human, All Too Human, was, Nietzsche tells us in his mock autobiography Ecce Homo (written just before his mental collapse), concluded by being dictated to his friend Peter Gast, my head bandaged up in pain.4 The pain he endured seems to have been relentless. At the age of thirty-six, Nietzsche notes, I reached the nadir...