A very rare copy of Illich’s ferocious 1975 critique of modern medicine argues that industrialised healthcare can become a source of illness in its own right. 

As it stands, the system is accountable for producing dependence, medicalising ordinary life, and transferring authority over suffering and death from people and communities to professional institutions. Moving from clinical harm into what he calls the wider social production of illness, Illich implores us to see how the current understanding of “health” is something administered to us rather than a capacity we possess.

Still provocative half a century later, Medical Nemesis sits at the intersection of medicine, political economy, institutional critique and the politics of autonomy.

Calder & Boyars, 1975 paperback. Vintage copy with visible rubbing, creasing and edge wear to covers; pages remain sound and readable.