The Medarchy: Medical Discipline and the Panopticon in Caduceus Wild

Abstract

This article explores the paradoxical nature of biopower when social, political and economic interests clash with individuality and autonomy. Special emphasis is placed on the Foucauldian concept of the panopticon to examine the mechanisms of (self-) surveillance as the most effective instruments of social control. Taking the recent pandemic as the starting point for critical reflection, this article raises questions about the purview of biopower through the analysis of the speculative novel Caduceus Wild, published in 1959 by Ward Moore with Robert Bradford. This analysis first focuses on the panopticon as the main instrument of discipline to contain the global health crisis provoked by the coronavirus. Secondly, it examines the particularities of
healthcare dystopias. Finally, it explores the potential of the discourses of biopower to transform the institutional authority of medicine acting in the name of public health
into an oppressive system of social control by adopting the form of a totalitarian medical regime, as described in the fictional world imagined by Moore and Bradford.