Medizin als Selbstverbesserungstechnologie, schlauer Artikel mit embedded nuggets, zum Beispiel einem rosa Uboot, auf dem Cary Grant ein Interview über LSD gibt und einer Autobiographie, die "Muscles" heißt.

American Bioscience Meets the American Dream. Here and abroad, the road to self-fulfillment is lined with drugs and surgery. By Carl Elliott .

Quotes:

In his memoir Muscle , Samuel Fussell describes ... [...] I have been born again," he told the astonished group. "I have been through a psychiatric experience which has completely changed me." The psychiatric experience to which [Cary] Grant was referring was the result of LSD, which he claimed to have used more than 60 times. As he sat tanning himself on the deck of a pink submarine, Grant described the way that LSD had put him in touch with his inner self. [...] In 1972, at the age of 45, [Jan] Morris traveled to Casablanca, Morocco, and underwent sex-reassignment surgery. After the operation, Morris felt clean, felt normal and, most of all, felt like ... herself. "I was not to others what I was to myself," Morris writes. "All I wanted was ... to live as myself, to clothe myself in a more proper body, and achieve Identity at last." [...] In medicine, the ethic of authenticity has given the pursuit of psychological well-being the same kind of moral imperative once reserved for treating illnesses. [...] Yet it would be a mistake to think this is merely a matter of the market creating an illness. It is also a matter of a technology creating an illness. Wherever we can make the tools of medicine work, the condition that we are working on tends to be reconceptualized as a medical problem. It used to be the case that some people could not have children. This was not a medical problem; it was an unfortunate fact of nature. But once new reproductive technologies -- such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation -- came on the scene, that fact of nature was reconceptualized as a medical problem. Now it is called "infertility" and is treated by medical specialists. This kind of reconceptualization runs throughout the history of psychiatry.