By Maria Popova “If the body is not the soul, what is the soul?” wrote Walt Whitman in his heroic revolt against the lasting tyranny of Descartes, whose dismissal of the body and disdain for the soul may be the single most damaging ideological misstep of modernity. Long before we had evidence that the body is where we heal the traumas of being, that it is our mightiest instrument of sanity and joy, that “the mind narrates what the nervous system knows,” Whitman ministered to disfigured soldiers as a volunteer Civil War nurse, knowing what we still, in our age of disembodied intellects, deny — … Continue reading The Body as Revolution: Che Guevara on Social Medicine and Personal Health as a Political Act