Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

The psychic technology crucial to justifying the expansion of empire was the invention of the diametrically opposed concepts of “society” and “nature.” Humans who were capable of allegedly rational thought—usually white, Christian, landowning men—comprised “society.” The rest of the planet—non-Europeans, women, animals, rivers, and plants—were defi

This close relationship between aging and inflammation has led to the clever neologism “inflamm-aging.”

Typically in septic shock, a person’s body sets off intense inflammation in response to an infection or trauma. Body temperature spikes to a fever to fight the offender. It can then plunge into hypothermia as the body fails to correct the

Since 1942 the United States, home to 573 federally recognized tribal nations,31 has required schoolchildren to forget that number and each morning pledge their allegiance to “one nation under God.”

If you find yourself more convinced by studying skeletal remains than by listening to the oral histories of Indigenous people, you’re a participant in a colonial system of organizing truth. Reconstructing history through bones misses much that oral histories capture. Yet in a colonial world, stories passed down by Indigenous elders cannot be consid

Matzinger challenged the idea that the human body is as interested in “the self” as nineteenth-century

Attempts to confer legal rights of personhood to Lake Erie were struck down by the courts, while laws that bestow on corporations the rights of people continue unchallenged. And there’s a reason: it’s easier to scoop the heart out of a mountain when it’s a resource than when it’s a living relative.

that determine whether aging cells will become drivers of chronic systemic inflammation.18

the immune response “is called into action by alarm signals from injured tissues, rather than by the recognition of nonself.”