Two Opposing Movements: Dissecting Life or Inhabiting It

A forgotten crossroads

The history of modern medicine follows a double movement. On one side, an ever-increasing fragmentation of the body—initiated by anatomy, continued through biology, and radicalized by genomics and network medicine. On the other, a quiet but persistent yearning for a lost unity: the unity of a lived, inhabited body—present to itself, beyond organs.
Medicine has never fully acknowledged this crossroads. But today, it can no longer be ignored.

Hubert von Luschka: Organizing the Visible in Order to Heal

My great-great-grandfather, Hubert von Luschka, represents a foundational moment in the analytical branch of medicine. A renowned 19th-century anatomist and professor in Tübingen, he was ennobled for his scientific work. He didn’t invent anatomy, but he made it operational. He gave medicine the ability to see with precision.
His work provided a shared cartography of the body: nerves, arteries, partitions, hollows, ducts. He quite literally “filled the body with organs.” In doing so, he made surgical, descriptive, and reproducible medicine possible. He established a common language for healing. I am proud of this legacy.

Organs without body, From Organ to Network: Fragmenting Ever Further

But this foundational gesture evolved into a movement that forgot its origin. What Luschka opened as a vision, modern medicine transformed into an endless program of segmentation.
Today, one discipline follows another: molecular medicine, genomics, proteomics, network medicine.
Each organ becomes a node, each cell an interface, each gene a potential lever. The body is modeled, dissected, treated as an algorithmic system. But within this mesh, the experience of life is lost.
What cannot be quantified is often disqualified. What is felt without biological trace becomes suspect. The symptom loses its status as message and becomes background noise.

The Opposite Movement: Body without organs :  Symptoms, the Instant

In contrast to this centrifugal logic, another movement emerges. Quieter. More fragile. But just as radical. It is the one I carry in my practice.
It may begin with Artaud, who in a visionary cry formulated the idea of the “body without organs” (CsO): “When you will have made him a body without organs, you will have delivered him from all his automatisms.”
Deleuze and Guattari extend this idea—the CsO becomes a space of intensities, flows, and transformations beyond organic codes. It also lives in forms of medicine based on presence, listening, and immediacy: homeopathy, osteopathy, magnetism, the arts of attention.
I do not reject organs. I do not deny anatomy. But I invert the hierarchy: the symptom becomes the doorway, the lived experience the starting point, the present moment the space of healing.

Toward a Medicine of the Living

What I propose is not alternative medicine. It is a medicine of reversed integration:
Past knowledge (anatomy, biology, clinical practice) is not denied,
But its hierarchy of priorities is reversed.
Sensation, symptom, lived signs take first place.
Knowledge becomes a tool, not a filter.
The present moment becomes a therapeutic compass, not a detour.

Between Luschka and Artaud

I do not oppose my ancestor and my inspirations. On the contrary: I hold them together.
Hubert von Luschka gave medicine a legible body.
Artaud, in his wild way, denounced the existential cost.
I stand between them: at the crossroads of a world that dissects and a world that feels. A world that names, and one that bears witness.

Conclusion: A Post-Historical Medicine

What I call post-historical medicine is a form of medicine not based on the past. Not on memory, not on organs, not on models.
It is a medicine grounded in the immediate present, in the direct testimony of the living, in what vibrates here and now.
A return—not to the past—but to presence. A healing—not against disease—but open to what is waiting to be born.
Perhaps this is the future of care: a return without reversal, a passage beyond form, into the raw light of what is.