In the Mirror of the Past

September 30, 1991
Once an implacable critic of orthodox medicine, Illich ( Medical Nemesis ) now claims that the medical establishment's grip has weakened amidst the craze for body-building, herbs and holistic health. ``Today's major pathogen is, I suspect, the pursuit of a healthy body,'' he rashly suggests. Writing of stultifying schools, the author argues that slum children in the South Bronx need ``protection from education.'' He endorses ``eloquent silence'' as a means to protest the nuclear arms race. Cranky, retrograde, utopian ideas mark these exercises in radical eco-chic that often compare our dehumanized industrial world with 12th-century Europe, which, in Illich's romanticized view, protected the poor, encouraged local autonomy and ensured access to water, pasture, woods and livestock. He stimulates and challenges in pieces on education and living space as social constructs, the machine-like behavior of people chained to electronic devices and a cultural/mythic history of water. First serial to Whole Earth magazine.