Welcome!

In a former life, I taught and researched philosophy at university. I was working on many things, among which the philosophy of illness, disability, and medicine. I was in the early stages of writing a book, which I’d tentatively titled Epistemology of the Clinic.

In September 2022, a covid infection disabled me. I acquired many new illnesses under the umbrella term of “long Covid”, by far the most disabling of which is myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME, also sometimes ME/CFS). I have a severe form of ME: I was almost completely bedbound until April 2023, when a reinfection or a bad reaction to a medication left me entirely bedbound: my feet have not touched the floor at all since. I am very sick, and forced to spend the vast majority of my days lying in complete silence and darkness, and to endure quite a horrific level of suffering. The rest of the time, I can use my phone a bit, and sometimes have very short (but precious) conversations with my best friend and carer Camilla.

I have been making little notes in my phone about ideas for the book, for when I’m well enough to write it, but I’ve slowly come to accept that time may not come, or at least not anytime soon. So I’ve decided to try my hand at blogging. Perhaps an effective treatment will come and I can turn some of the thoughts I’ll share here into the book I wanted to write. Perhaps not. In any case, I wanted to record these thoughts, if only for myself. These blog posts will have been written in short bursts of a few minutes, on my phone, sandwiched between long stretches of complete physical and cognitive inactivity.

My hope for these thoughts is not only that my fellow sick and disabled people might find them interesting and enjoyable to read, but also that my posts might articulate some things that, because of the life we are forced to live by sickness and society, we all already know and yet cannot easily assert. A secondary hope is that at least some of my former colleagues might read these posts and find them enriching.

The title of the blog contains a technical word, “epistemology”, which is used in philosophy to refer to the study of knowledge and belief: who has knowledge and in virtue of what, how beliefs come to be constructed, what it means to call them “objective” or “subjective”, when they’re justified or reliable and when they’re not. 

A lot of work has been done on how various research methodologies (like RCTs, meta-analyses, mechanical reasoning, etc) yield results that may be more or less justified, more or less solid, more or less reliable. But I have always been interested in more than just clinical studies: in the way that supposed-knowledge is sometimes used to further oppress already oppressed people, and in the way new and often better (more accurate, more scientific, more objective) knowledge is created, acquired, and shared by oppressed people. This was the guiding idea behind the book project, in the particular context of medical care, and this is what I’ll be writing about in this blog.

I hope you enjoy it! Please please please, whoever you are and especially if you are also sick yourself, don’t hesitate to write to me with thoughts, comments, questions, objections, refutations, suggestions, reading recommendations, agreements, anything! I am very sick so it might take me a while to respond but I definitely will; and I will be delighted to engage.

Chloé

PS. I’ve been asked by a friend whether it was possible to get email updates when a new post is published. It used to be supported by this platform, but no longer is, so I’ve prepared a manual setup: if you want to receive news of a new post by email, you can enter your email address here: https://forms.gle/wb1zHHtSJqJbMSD56.