The Enlightened Patient – |
My dissertation project investigates the transformational processes that occur in the transfer of information about health care and disease. What kind of medial conditions are necessary to enlighten the health-interested person? What forms must knowledge take in order to empower the patient to responsibly manage his or her own health or to cope with disease?
For the last several centuries, changes in health communication have essentially been characterized by the media of information transmission. Medical expertise first became available to a broad public in the eighteenth century, with the expansion and differentiation of the book market. Medicine's newly postulated claim of objectivity, the rise in literacy, as well as new quality assurance measures equipped the health-interested person with the tools necessary to act according to the Enlightenment paradigm of the independent and rational self.
Associated with this paradigm is the capacity of the individual to form an opinion about the reliability and usability of medical knowledge. In this context, the basic problems of health communication have been aggravated since the beginning of the digital age. An unmanageable range of information, challenges to medicine's claims of objectivity, and obstacles to verifying quality all weaken the patient's autonomy. The internet creates unique hurdles for the individual seeking reliable information: genres and formats which are in flux, the dissolution of the traditional roles of author and reader and new challenges related to media competence.
My study thus seeks to clarify: Which basic communicative functions and benefits have the individual genres and formats of health communication taken, from the eighteenth century to the present day, in order to strengthen the position of the enlightened patient? Relying on comparative analysis à la Max Weber, the study will try to discover which format fulfils which function according to the patient's best interest. The mediality of the terms of analysis will itself be an issue that has to be addressed. The project will therefore reconstruct the basic problems of knowledge communication in modern societies: contradiction, sensationalism and self-reference. By identifying those discourses which relate to these three problems, the project aims to trace the media history of the enlightened patient.