Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books: "This work is so intimately imbricated in Burke's own vision of the medical profession which is the subject of the book that there can be no claim at all to neutrality in the work. The dedication, in handwriting on an otherwise blank page, is the only piece of Burke's own writing in the book ... The other blocks of text either come from the Bible or from a book about the experience of the human body from the perspective of a surgeon: Richard Selzer's 'Moral Lessons' ... Burke uses photographs in a collaged sequence of single images but the effect is a book full of movement and action. In Burke's book the distinctions between the practices of Western medical teams performing neurosurgical procedures and the activity of shamans among Hmong tribesmen in Laos or the activities of various Christian fundamentalists in ceremonies with rattlesnakes and copperheads, are all interwoven as aspects of a single theme: medicine and faith. This calls into question the habitual terms which separate these subjects into different categories. Each image is intensely vivid, from those which show dramatic scenes of a brain open and exposed during surgery to those of an animal being slaughtered. The intensity of the spiritual drama of medicine and its grounding in cultural belief systems is continually reinforced by these images. ... The power of this book derives from the strength of the photographic juxtapositions and Burke's attention to the structural effect of sequence."

Ref: GB/924