## Metadata - Author: [[Rupa Marya]] - Full Title: Inflamed - Category: #books - Summary: Raj Patel, the New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with physician, activist, and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition Rupa Marya to reveal the links between health and structural injustices—and to offer a new deep medicine that can heal our bodies and our worldThe coronavirus pandemic and the shocking racial disparities in its impact. The surge in inflammatory illnesses such as gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. Mass uprisings around the world in response to systemic racism and violence. Climate refugees. Our bodies, societies, and planet are inflamed. Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body: our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, however, this groundbreaking book illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political... ## Highlights - The root of a diagnosis is a knowledge of antecedent parts that make sense of the present in order to change the future. Without taking into account the myriad ways systemic injustice impacts the body, the standard medical narrative connecting the past, present, and future falls short, lacking the explanatory power to address and change the course of illness. An accurate diagnosis of Covid in the Rogue Valley must involve a complete history of the arrangements of power that led to certain lives being considered expendable, sacrificed to profits from pear trees planted on land acquired through colonial violence and theft.[24](#footnote-24) Put a different way, an accurate diagnosis of the workers in Alicia’s community would implicate the systems of injustice created during the colonial era, beginning with the exploitation and enslavement of the Takelma people and ending with a system of racial capitalism that treats migrant workers as disposable.[25](#footnote-25) A story that fails to incorporate this history is one that can have no part in healing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfns7k9ks2b0f4kgyjrsm70)) - In 2008 a young radiology resident, Yehonatan Turner, felt frustrated reading CT scans without knowing anything about the patients as people. He started including a photo of patients’ faces alongside their scans and then studied the impact on radiologists, who could see the person whose images they were analyzing. All radiologists involved with the study reported feeling more empathy toward the patients after seeing the photograph, and in turn, the interpretations they gave were more “meticulous.”[67](#footnote-67) Rehumanization can begin with something as simple as looking at a photograph. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfpnsq16ze3yfn418aahgft)) - Human bodies are rendered alien from doctors through the rituals of education in biology. Most humans get some version of this biological miseducation in high school, and it is how most of us are taught to relate to the web of life. The school system teaches us to amputate our concern for other living beings and for the land itself. Animals are just meat, land is just a commodity, work can be bought and sold, humans are a resource, and everything else a means of production. The result is our license to use animals in any way we see fit and to be able to trade in land. This is how life and territory are orphaned from humans. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfpq2w6xtzm0dbj6x81zt41)) - If you find yourself more convinced by studying skeletal remains than by listening to the oral histories of Indigenous people, you’re a participant in a colonial system of organizing truth. Reconstructing history through bones misses much that oral histories capture. Yet in a colonial world, stories passed down by Indigenous elders cannot be considered true until they are validated by the empires that colonized them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfq4ehvh25zv2cwt2hb138k)) - Practitioners of modern medicine are not trained to be healers. They are trained to be biomedical technicians. When the causes of poor health lie outside the patient, in the environment or in society, doctors are frequently at a loss. Hunger, for instance, isn’t considered a disease that falls under doctors’ purview—a sign of how broken modern medicine has become. Doctors are trained not only to look exclusively at the patient as a solitary individual—shorn of context or structure, stripped of life in all its complexity—but to treat that individual as a broken machine, as a dysfunctional and occasionally noncompliant robot bearing a symptom. This is a relic of colonial thinking. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfq7jgdf85h7b66773bjc2z)) - For Indigenous communities in North America, the act of connecting young people back to their ancestral lands is cutting suicide rates without the use of Western medicine or pharmaceuticals.[76](#footnote-76) Having a sense of belonging improves health outcomes. Cultural continuity and dignity are in themselves determinants of health.[77](#footnote-77) These benefits are available and relevant not to Indigenous people alone. They are a path for all of us who must learn to relate differently than in the prescribed ways—and with the proscribed identities—that colonialism has created for us. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfqa0zrk38ynxkk37pywayk)) - For many, this won’t be an easy book to read, because it *can’t* be an easy book to read. Colonialism has made the institutions through which we daily become who we think we are. Historically it fashioned schools, hospitals, prisons, corporations, borders, charities, militaries, farms, and homes, whether in settler societies, postcolonial countries, or in colonial metropoles. Confronting that is difficult work, particularly because treating the inflammation we are collectively facing requires us to understand the dimensions of pathological thought that brought us here. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfqamqt2kcrp4f3a9fhk78h)) - Decolonizing invites us to stretch our diagnoses back to a time when the concept of *the self* mattered less than the relationships upon which our lives depended, from the microbes inside us to the world around us. It calls on us to develop new methodologies of diagnosis, ones that center other ways of telling our stories and other ways of knowing that connect us to entities beyond our skin. Instead of pulling apart to know, we are bringing together to understand. This kind of diagnosis situates our damage and our healing more clearly in the past, present, and future. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpfqccgaqn6gtjzsjxebdgp6)) - From 1845 to 1849, a million Irish citizens died from famine. And yet in 1846 Ireland exported 500,000 pigs and 30,000 tons of grain to England, where prices were higher. The Irish died for want not of food but of money to buy it ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpg4yjpy7gxns8y18rp7547e)) - When local government officials in Cork proposed paying Irish laborers higher wages for a public works program that would allow them to buy food for their families, *The Economist* scolded them for the error of suggesting > to pay them not what their labour is worth, not what their labour can be purchased for, but what is sufficient for a comfortable subsistence for themselves and their family. Do they not see that, on this principle, they must pay a man not in proportion to the value of his labour but in proportion to the size of his family—that they must pay the decrepit and imbecile married man with ten children at least 2 [shillings] per day, while the able, diligent, frugal, and fore-looking bachelor may be put off 4 [pence] or 6 [pence]? Do they not see that to do this would be to stimulate every man to marry and to populate as fast as he could, like a rabbit in a warren—in other words that to apply this to Ireland would be to give brandy to a man lying dead drunk in a ditch?[55](https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/25879260#footnote-132) To put it bluntly, as *The Economist* did in 1846, “they have been kept at home and taught to rely more than ever on others and less than ever on themselves.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gpg50e04jby63xmx49e67zg4))