Medicine as a social artefact: Science, magic, and commodity
Medicine as a social artefact: Science, magic, and commodity

Summary/Abstract: This article examines modern medicine as a hybrid social artifact that exists at the crossroads of science, magic, and commerce. Drawing on insights from medical sociology, medical anthropology, and science–technology–society (STS) studies, it develops an integrated theoretical framework that views medicine as an epistemic object, a cultural symbol, and a product of the global political economy. The analysis explores how the processes of medicalization, biomedicalization, and pharmaceuticalization reshape the relationship among the body, identity, and governance, transforming health into a continuous biotechnological endeavor managed through risks, algorithms, and pharmaceutical infrastructures. At the same time, it investigates the symbolic and ‘magical’ aspects of medicine, from the ambivalence of pharmakon and daily rituals of administration to pharmaceutical lives, belief, hope, and conspiracies and demonstrates how these elements intertwine with the economic logic of the globalized pharmaceutical market, characterized by the fetishization and spectacle of commodities, inequalities in access, and regimes of pharmapower. Methodologically, the analysis relies on a theoretical and interpretative review of specialized literature, providing a critical synthesis that considers medicine as a “total social fact” (Mauss, 1925). The article argues that understanding modern medicine requires an interdisciplinary approach that addresses both the physical existence of molecules and their symbolic and economic circulation.

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