Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

David B Morris

University of California Press, £17.50, pp 360

ISBN 0 520 20869 2

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The postmodern view of our world is simultaneously terrifying and liberating. By the start of this century, the great explanation of religion, promising perfection in an everlasting life after death, had given way to the big utopian political visions, which promised a perfect society in this life. Through the middle part of the century, these visions were inexorably corrupted into monstrous dystopias, and now, in our postmodern world, the resulting disillusion has fostered a deep distrust of all comprehensive explanations of, and solutions to, the human predicament. The notion of absolute truth has given way to an acceptance of …