Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Disease X and Africa: How a Scientific Metaphor Entered Popular Imaginaries of the Online Public During the COVID-19 Pandemic
No full textIn 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the addition of Disease X, a hypothetical infectious threat, to its blueprint list of priority diseases. In the construction of discourse that circulated following this announcement, conceptions of Disease X intersected with representations of Africa. In our article, we share a broad strokes analysis of internet narratives about Disease X and Africa in the six months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (July–December 2019) and during its first six months (January–June 2020). Our analysis focuses on how the scientific concept of Disease X was applied by ‘non-experts’ to make meaning from risk, uncertainty, and response. These non-experts drew in parallel upon more general representations of power, fear, and danger. This research is particularly relevant at the time of writing, as online narratives about COVID-19 vaccination are shaping vaccine anxiety throughout the world by drawing upon similar conceptions of agency and inequality. Because Disease X in Africa still looms as a perceived future threat, considering the narratives presented in this paper can provide insight into how people create meaning when faced with a scientific concept, a global health crisis, and the idea that there are other crises yet to come.  
Becoming a Mother During COVID-19: Adjustments in Performing Motherhood
No full textBased on online semi-structured interviews with middle-class women who were pregnant or had recently given birth in Western Europe (France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland), this study analyses how motherhood has been experienced and performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article reflects on the specific new risk assessments and responsibilities that emerged during the pandemic by showing women’s coping strategies concerning lockdowns and other public health measures. Using a COVID-19 lens also allows a broader analysis of middle-class families’ concerns about performing ‘good motherhood’. By highlighting the discrepancies between women’s expected and actual experiences, the prescriptive aspects of pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum phase are revealed and analysed, prompting us to consider parenting as a form of doing and proving. By underlining the importance attached to the expectant mother’s wellbeing, the partner’s involvement, the support of relatives, and the future socialisation of the baby, we argue that women face a myriad of imperatives to ensure a meaningful experience of motherhood
Apprenticeship, Or Learning to Be An Expert
No full textCommentary to the special issue \u27Therapeutic Apprenticeship: Uncovering Truth and Performing Responsibility\u27 by Vania Smith-Oka
‘Beautiful’ Medicine: Gender Segregation by Medical Specialty in Ukraine
No full textIn Ukraine and in other former Soviet socialist republics, women make up a sizeable majority of those practicing medicine—a proportion estimated at around 70% over the course of the 20th century. Women predominate in most specialties, including prestigious disciplines such as cardiology or oncology, with the stark exception of surgical fields. While gender segregation by medical specialty has often been explained as women having been channelled out from more lucrative fields and into less prestigious medical specialties such as primary care, I suggest that broader sociopolitical and cultural forces are primarily responsible for this horizontal segregation. The central pillars of Ukraine’s dominant version of femininity—motherhood and beauty—gain special place in the nation’s decolonisation process and position women to take up medicine as a profession, while simultaneously preventing them from specialising in surgery in the same high numbers. In medical school and at work, gendered bodies are read to be in the right or wrong place as communities of practice informally instruct students and young practitioners about how easy or difficult it will be for them to belong to certain subfields. ‘Beautiful’ (non-surgical) specialties enhance women’s cultural authority even if they are not always as well-remunerated as the surgical ones. They permit flexible schedules and career paths, connote social grace, and solidify women’s central role in families, and ultimately in national reproduction
An Ethnographer’s Dilemma: Researching Birthing Practices in India
No full textThese field notes are based on my research study which aims to understand the recent changes and developments in childbirth practices in India that propagate natural birthing practices as a childbirth choice available to birthing women. Drawing from this multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in birth centres in India from November 2018 to October 2019, I reflect on my fieldwork engagements to show the dilemmas that emerged during my research. In these field notes, I examine my position as a researcher with a focus on the complex ways in which the relationship between the respondents (birth professionals and birthing couples) and the researcher is navigated in a field site. 
Social distance forever? Or, What is a Horizon for ‘Being near, Together with Others’?
No full textIn light of COVID-19 infection control measures, which establish a minimum distance of 6 feet between bodies, many have emphasised the need to maintain social closeness despite physical distance. This Position Piece considers the flip side of this concern: in key spaces that structure social interactions in the US today, physical closeness does not equal social closeness. ‘This country is like a prison,’ one of my interlocutors told me, pointing to carceral histories of social distancing that predateCOVID-19. Moreover, in the co-constituted spaces of criminalisation and justice, punishment and care, distance and proximity, and carceral freedom, the physical closeness of people that couldhave registered as social closeness is precluded, culminating in deadly disregard. Drawing on my medical training and on fieldwork documentation of medical harms in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention apparatus, I consider how non-responsiveness spreads within and beyond institutions of immigration enforcement. I suggest that medical providers are implicated in what I call ‘contagious containment’—that is, the impulse to distance oneself from harmful realities in which one’s clinical practice is complicit. This distancing reinforces the idea of humanity being a scarce resource, especially when the racialised stratification of economic and political resources is preserved in and through institutions like ICE detention. Contagious containment offers the fantasy of separating one’s clinical work from the apparatus of harming and, so long as such reservoirs of life-threatening disregard remain, such contagion can (and does) spread
Long-term Care Hospitals and Changing Elderly Care in South Korea
No full textUntil recently in South Korea, the central dilemma facing children with ageing parents was how and by whom their parents should be cared for. In accordance with the norm of filial piety, the eldest son used to take responsibility. However, with the recent proliferation of long-term care hospitals, this arrangement is changing. These institutions, which play the combined role of rehabilitative hospital, long-term care centre, and nursing home, admit elderly people who do not require active medical intervention. The government’s promotion of these hospitals, centred on deregulation, ambiguity around their function, and the lack of alternative care facilities, has led to an expansion of the sector and consequently to the ‘nursing hom(e)fication’ of many of these institutions. While these hospitals ease the pressures associated with an ageing population, their mainstreaming has had an impact on healthcare, medicine, and the lives of elderly people. The hospital field has become commercialised, medical practice is being transformed, and the dignity of elderly people is being lost through hospitalisation. In this new care regime, filial piety itself is undergoing transformation—from an ideology underpinning the domestication of care, to the market idiom of service compliance. In this article, I introduce these hospitals and investigate how their growth has brought about a Korean style of elderly care commodification, revealing the undercurrents of healthcare privatisation and the neoliberalisation of welfare