Resetting the Bodily Social for Drugs: A Vital Experiment on Aging, Fragility, and End of Life

• In Event: Diagnosing Death: Critical STS Perspectives - III

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the last journey of life from a perspective that echoes the recent STS scholarship concerning drugs and the human condition drugs create. Departing from literature that treats aging care and hospice/end-of-life care separately, this paper insists that observing the life paths of an aging individual is a necessity. With special attention paid to a group of "over-dosed" old people identified by Taiwan's health insurance bureau, it argues for a preliminary yet serious investigation of aging people’s social and bodily conditions as well as their dynamic relationship with pharmaceuticals. For this, three sites are chosen: an out-patient clinic for ageing people, a general ward, and a hospice ward--all in a medical center famous for its service for ageing clients. They clarify the bodily social situations in discussion and exemplify the institutional and clinical characteristics of how aging people engage with drugs toward the rest of their lives. As both an experiment and scholarly snapshot on aging, fragility, and end of life and pharmaceuticals, this paper hopes to reveal not only the ways people are provoked into taking drugs in order to maintain their way of life, but also the transfiguration of these people as they start losing control over their bodies and social lives and become subject to institutional care/death.

Author

• Wen-Hua Kuo, National Yang-Ming University