Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Memes in medical education: Making sense of professional authority
Get PDFMemes are highly malleable forms of visual media that provide insight into the dominant discourses within a community. This essay presents the top meme posts on /r/medicalschool, a thread on Reddit, an anonymous news-aggregating site, which are the most discussed posts by users, who are predominantly medical students. Within this digital space, users attempt to make meaning of the process of professionalization and what their new roles have in store for them. Studying those memes’ accompanying comments, we find that the majority of posts center on perceptions of diminishing professional authority. These perceptions likely stem from an ontological insecurity due to significant financial burdens, debt, and risk involved in going to medical school
Becoming a target of HIV intervention: The science and politics of anthropological reframing
Get PDFThis think piece asks readers to consider how the science of anthropology has contributed to (re)categorization and imaginaries of gender, class, and the state in the context of public and global health interventions. Anthropological work on HIV has since its inception questioned the public health categories of those considered at highest risk for HIV, while simultaneously helping to reconstitute those categories, as well as definitions of risk, especially in relation to the concept of vulnerability. While anthropological research on HIV is replete with critiques of categorization as a mode of governance, most often in reference to global health and development apparatuses, anthropologists rarely reflect on the role the discipline might play in co-creating those categories to ‘make up people’ and reproduce geopolitical norms. The propositions I lay out in this think piece stem from my experience researching the emergence of public and global health categories in various national settings in eastern and southern Africa win the context of HIV interventions
Medical pluralism, boundary making, and tuberculosis in Lambaréné, Gabon
Get PDFScholars of medical pluralism are interested in how healers position themselves and their healing practices within a therapeutic landscape, and how patients navigate an array of therapeutic traditions. Based on fieldwork in Lambaréné, Gabon, this article examines the discursive practices of tuberculosis patients and healers, finding that therapeutic traditions were kept separate. Examining a national programme that fosters traditional medicine, I show how the Gabonese government engages in practices of boundary making by reinforcing traditional healers’ position within the Gabonese therapeutic landscape. This research confirms popular paradigms of boundary making within the medical pluralism debate, wherein boundaries are produced and crossed to contrast, strengthen, purify, and divide the therapeutic landscape. Additionally, formal state-sponsored discursive practices refer to a merging of traditional medicine and biomedical medicine. This stands in contrast with patients’ and healers’ discursive practices, and their wariness of fluid or adaptive boundary-making processes. To explain this, I introduce the concept of ‘conventional boundary making’ and then analyse it in the context of tuberculosis and in relation to theories of state power, Gabonese therapeutic identity politics, and structural violence
\u27There\u27s a crack in everything\u27: Or: How Leonard Cohen inspired my research on commercial surrogacy
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The power of suggestion: Disclosure ideologies and medically assisted death
Get PDFThis article examines an ethical controversy that has received relatively little attention in public debates about the legalization of medical aid-in-dying (AID): should physicians inform patients that they have the option of hastening death? Drawing on ethnographic research about the implementation of AID in Vermont, I argue that how we understand the moral stakes of this debate depends on divergent views regarding language use in social interactions. Some stakeholders in this debate view a physician’s words as powerful enough to damage the patient-physician relationship or to influence a patient to hasten her death, while others believe that merely informing patients about AID cannot move them to act against their own values and preferences. I illustrate how these divergent perspectives are tied to competing language ideologies regarding clinical disclosure, which I call ‘disclosure ideologies’. My analysis of these two disclosure ideologies surrounding AID highlights disclosure practices in medicine as a rich site for medical anthropological theorizing on linguistic performativity and the social power of clinical language
