Rather than reducing us, modern medicalisation multiplies us. “When you enter into contact with hospitals, your ‘rich subjective personality’ is not reduced to a mere package of objective meat: on the contrary, you are now learning to be affected by masses of agencies hitherto unknown not only to you, but also to doctors, nurses, administration, biologists, researchers who add to your poor inarticulate body complete sets of new instruments.” The body becomes a site of a profuse multiplicity: “How can you contain so much diversity, so many cells, so many microbes, so many organs, all folded in such a way that ‘the many act as one’, as [Alfred North] Whitehead said? No subjectivity, no introspection, no native feeling can be any match for the fabulous proliferation of affects and effects that a body learns when being processed by a hospital… Far from being less, you become more.”

Bruno Latour and the philosophy of life