Review Of: The Biomedical Empire

Abstract

Barbara Katz Rothman focuses on the biomedical empire, how it governs our lives, and the implications of its growing power. The biomedical empire, according to the author, is the transnational arrangement of entities involved in medicine and healthcare that behave like imperial powers. While the book primarily draws on examples from the United States and the author's own lived experience, Rothman makes the case that the biomedical empire is transnational and transcends the nation-state. Unfolding over ten chapters, the book contributes to existing work in the sociology of medicine and scholarship on empire in contemporary contexts.First, why is biomedicine a useful lens to understand imperial formations? Rothman argues that the biomedical empire demonstrates the hold that biomedicine has on our daily lives, from birth to death. Growing aspects of life are being medicalized including "problems, joys, events, accomplishments, failures, hopes, and dreams" (19). Medicalization, the author points out, creates new categories of risk that individuals are responsible for managing. The creation of pre-disease or pre-diabetes categories are a case in point. According to Rothman, the process of creating new risk categories and medicalizing everyday life is not adequately explained by the social construction of illness, medical imperialism, and diagnostic imperialism approaches. In this