Medicine Anthropology Theory
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Transnational families, migration, and the circulation of care: Understanding mobility and absence in family life
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Accommodating care: Transplant caregiving and the melding of health care with home life in the United States
Get PDFIn this article, I explore how medical care responsibilities in the United States are shifting away from formal clinical contexts and into the home. Using organ transplant-related care as an illustrative example of this larger phenomenon, I trace the incorporation of health care into the home using three cases from ethnographic fieldwork near a major transplant center in the midwestern United States. Here, patients and loved ones transform their dwellings, lives, and relationships to attend to the demands of transplant medicine. Bringing together literature on hospitality, caregiving, houses and homes, and place and space in health care, I offer ‘accommodating care’ as a framework for understanding the materializing practices of home-based transplant care. This approach suggests avenues toward studying larger questions about the distinctiveness and overlap of medicine and home life
Liminality, possibility, and imperative: Performing the other in face transplantation
Get PDFThis piece seeks to expand the notion of liminality within medical anthropology by shifting attention to how in-between states are actively produced and performed by medical experts. While medical anthropologists have successfully engaged with the notion of liminality to make sense of patient experience, I suggest that it holds broader potential and can be used to examine the production of medico-political imperatives by clinical elites. To do this, I trace shifting ideas surrounding the need to utilize face transplantation as it relates to the promotion of an institutionally produced category – the ideal patient. While once the \u27ideal patient\u27 was seen as a panacea to the ethical issues at stake in the performance of the operation, it arguably now works to limit the ability of surgeons to utilize face transplants to reconstruct the appearances of severely disfigured people. In response, leading face transplant surgeons tactically emphasize the problematizing state of their patients who occupy the limen of life and death. They ascribe sick roles to individuals in order to afford agentive, moral force to (bio)ethically fraught experimental medicine
BRICS health and tuberculosis control collaborations during an era of global health
Get PDFIn this think piece, I examine the difference introduced by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) health collaborations in an era of global health. Using tuberculosis control as a grounding example, I show that BRICS collaborations prioritize: state-led solutions, particularly through policies aimed at expanding universal health coverage; scientific and programmatic innovation; experience and technology sharing; clear benchmarks for progress, based on current best practices of control; and flexibility. Unlike international health, BRICS health collaborations are not primarily concerned with preventing the importation of infectious disease across national borders. Nor are they based on global health’s concerns about global biosecurity or humanitarian biomedicine. Rather, BRICS collaborative health efforts fall within the nation-state paradigm, while also aspiring towards the global. They remain flexible in their operation, gesturing towards a neoliberal ethic. This flexibility allows BRICS to work within existing structures, while also establishing their own institutions from which to change traditional assistance relationships