Illness as a Work of Thought is a practical application of Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods of the study of illness and modernity. From medicine and psychiatry to psychology and the social sciences, Monica Greco explores what the history of these different disciplines contributes to what we understand by the term 'psychosomatics' and analyses how the study of psychosomatic illness can transform the way we think of illness, subjectivity and the ethics and politics of health.

Introduction 1. The Symptoms of Truth: A Historical Search 2. Hide and Seek: Medicine and 'Somatization' 3. The Vital and the Social 4. Does Psychosomatics Exist? An Introduction 5. The Dispersion of Psychosomatics 6. Interpreting the Bodily Sign 7. Interpreting the Signs of Embodiment 8. Who is the Subject of Somatic Pathology?