Funding the Future Medicine is not neutral
Jan 11, 2026
Explore how medicine has shaped societal power dynamics. Discover the disturbing history of drapetomania, where enslaved people’s desire for freedom was diagnosed as illness. Learn how women's anger was pathologized as hysteria. Delve into the medical suppression of homosexuality and its consequences. Discuss current issues around trans rights and neurodivergence being framed as deficits. Examine how conformity is enforced in schools and workplaces. Finally, consider a new politics of care that embraces difference and fosters true liberation.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Drapetomania: Freedom Branded Illness
- Richard Murphy recounts the 1851 diagnosis drapetomania that labeled enslaved people's desire to escape as mental illness.
- He shows how medicine redefined resistance as pathology to protect slavery and economic exploitation.
Hysteria Used To Silence Women
- Murphy describes how women's anger, ambition and sexual autonomy were medicalised as hysteria and used to lock women up.
- He frames this as enforced clinical control that blocked women's social and political progress.
Alan Turing: Medicine Enforced Conformity
- Murphy points to homosexuality's classification as a disorder and recounts Alan Turing's forced chemical treatment and suicide in 1954.
- He uses Turing's case to show medical intervention enforced social conformity with deadly consequences.