Feverish financial systems, physician bankers and ailing markets

In commentary on financial matters, markets periodically develop fevers, have heart attacks and display symptoms of a range of pathologies. Policymakers and regulators adopt the guise of physicians who work to restore those markets to health. This essay explores the social significance of corporeal metaphors and organic analogies associated with ‘the medicalisation of finance’, with a focus on how changing understandings of bodies acquired through scientific investigation changed the ways that people apprehend money. When these analogies begin to break down, it becomes possible to engage them more critically, question their naturalising presumptions and notice how they reinforce particular configurations of power.