“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”
—Rudolf Virchow

Documentary, scientific, psychoanalytical, and medical interests are mashed up and overlap with fiction and narrative invention in Francesco Bertocco’s practice, which in its more than ten years of activity has centered mainly on the filmic medium. This publication is dedicated to the video work and photographic series Historia (2021), realized thanks to the support of the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019). An investigation into the history of Chilean medicine, the project emphasizes the passage from ancestral knowledge to science, from collective care to individual salvation. With newly commissioned essays on biopolitics, the “medicalization” of art, social medicine, and the right to health as well as two literary takes on the topics and extensive illustrations, the book questions the relationships between hospitalization and social control, science and the broader idea of care. “Care” has its etymological root in the Latin word cura, writes curator Mariagrazia Muscatello: “On the one hand cura signifies being concerned about someone or something, paying attention to the other, empathizing, but at the same time it has the meaning of custody and supervision, of an inexorable control.”