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What does it mean to be a good doctor in America today? How do such challenges as new biotechnologies, the threat of malpractice suits, and proposed health-care reform affect physicians' ability to provide quality care? These and many other questions are examined in this book, which fully explores the meaning and politics of competence in modern American medicine. Based on ethnographic studies of three distinct medical communities—physicians in rural California, academics and students involved in Harvard Medical School's innovative “New Pathway” curriculum, and oncologists working on breast cancer treatment—it demonstrates the centrality of the issue of competence throughout the medical world. Competence, the book shows, provides the framework for discussing the power struggles between rural general practitioners and specialists, organizational changes in medical education, and the clinical narratives of high-technology oncologists. In their own words, practitioners, students, and academics describe what competence means to them and reveal their frustration with medical-legal institutions, malpractice, and the limitations of peer review and medical training.

What are the moral challenges and consequences of animal research in academic laboratory settings? Animal Ethos considers how the inescapable needs of lab research necessitate interspecies encounters that, in turn, engender unexpected moral responses among a range of associated personnel. Whereas much has been written about the codified, bioethical rules and regulations that inform proper lab behavior and decorum, Animal Ethos, as an in-depth, ethnographic project, probes the equally rich—yet poorly understood—realm of ordinary or everyday morality, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox thought and action evidence concerted efforts to transform animal laboratories into moral, scientific worlds. The work is grounded in efforts to integrate theory within medical anthropology (and, more particularly, on suffering and moral worth), animal studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Contrary to established scholarship that focuses exclusively on single professions (such as the researcher or technician), Animal Ethos tracks across the spectrum of the lab labor hierarchy by considering the experiences of researchers, animal technicians, and lab veterinarians. In turn, it offers comparative insights on animal activists. When taken together, this range of parties illuminates the moral complexities of experimental lab research. The affective qualities of interspecies intimacy, animal death, and species preference are of special analytical concern, as reflected in the themes of intimacy, sacrifice, and exceptionalism that anchor this work.

In April of 1979 the city of Sverdlovsk in Russia's Ural Mountains was struck by a frightening anthrax epidemic. Official Soviet documents reported sixty-four human deaths resulting from the ingestion of tainted meat sold on the black market, but U.S. intelligence sources implied a different story, and the lack of documentation left unresolved questions. In her investigation of the incident, the author of this book unravels the mystery of what really happened during that tragic event in Sverdlovsk. Anthrax is a virulent and deadly bacteria whose spores can remain in soil for as long as seventy years, killing grazing animals and putting humans in jeopardy of eating infected meat. Contemporary concern is more centered on anthrax as an airborne biological weapon whose inhaled spores can result in ninety percent mortality for those infected. As part of a team of doctors and researchers, the author traveled to Russia in 1992 to determine the cause and extent of the epidemic, and her narrative transforms a case of epidemiological investigation into a politically charged mystery. She creates a sense of immediacy and drama with her insider's account of the team's investigative work—the analysis of pathology photos and slides, meetings with political and public health officials, the retrieval of essential medical data—and reveals the subjective side of science as she conducts interviews with afflicted families, visits sites, and interacts with those suspected of clouding the truth.

Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth—routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? This book is a second edition of the text. The new preface in this edition makes it clear that the issues surrounding childbirth remain as controversial as ever. The book analyzes the technocratic method of birth, its cultural variations and alternatives, and obstetric training and women's experiences in Western culture. It covers ritual and how it is used in obstetrics, and compares the technocratic and holistic paradigms of childbirth. The book demonstrates the linkages between American core values concerning technology and expertise, and prevailing obstetrical practices.

This book takes us around the world in search of birth models that work in order to improve the standard of care for mothers and families everywhere. The contributors describe examples of maternity services from both developing countries and wealthy industrialized societies that apply the latest scientific evidence to support and facilitate normal physiological birth; deal appropriately with complications; and generate excellent birth outcomes—including psychological satisfaction for the mother. The book concludes with a description of the ideology that underlies all these working models, known internationally as the midwifery model of care.

This ethnography probes the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. The book shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavor. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Israeli women, interspersed with cross-cultural perspectives of surrogacy in the global context, the book traces the processes by which surrogates relinquish any maternal claim to the baby even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. The book's analysis reveals that as surrogates psychologically and emotionally disengage from the fetus they carry, they develop a profound and lasting bond with the intended mother.

This book is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today. This book penetrates the physician's private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily absorb either historical or current information about medical racism. For this reason, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and sociological perspectives.

This book chronicles the story of disability's emergence as an area of significant sociopolitical activity in contemporary China. Attentive to how bodies are embedded in discourse, history, and personal exigency, it details ways that disability became a fount for the production of institutions and identities across the Chinese landscape during the final decades of the twentieth century. The author looks closely at the creation of the China Disabled Persons' Federation and the lives of numerous individuals, among them Deng Pufang, son of China's Communist leader Deng Xiaoping.

This book explores the unintended consequences of compassion in the world of immigration politics. It focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two “regimes of care”—humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women—it asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? The book demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can become the means to residency papers, turning conditions such as HIV, cancer, and select experiences of sexual violence into distinct advantages for would-be migrants. It also indicts the inequalities forged by global capitalism that drive people to migrate, and the state practices which criminalize the majority of undocumented migrants at the expense of care for the exceptional few.

This book raises issues for public policy in the medical field. It is based on data accumulated during long-term research on Navajo Indian epidemiology. Through examination of this medical microcosm, it can be seen that the role of Western medicine presently needs review, clarification, and perhaps redefinition in today's complex social milieu. This book sees a future challenge to medicine in dealing with the degenerative and man-made diseases, as contrasted with its past successes in controlling infectious diseases. The wealth of information and its in-depth analysis make this book a valuable contribution to the growing literature on cross-cultural healthcare.

This book brings together the work of writers from a range of disciplines and cultural traditions to explore the social and political dimensions of sexuality and sexual experience. The chapters reconfigure existing notions of gender and sexuality, linking them to deeper understandings of power, resistance, and emancipation around the globe. They map areas that are currently at the cutting edge of social science writing on sexuality, as well as the complex interface between theory and practice. The book highlights the extent to which populations and communities that once were the object of scientific scrutiny have increasingly demanded the right to speak on their own behalf, as subjects of their own sexualities and agents of their own sexual histories.

This book explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. It uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings—even the endocrinological changes—associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, the book argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies. Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a disease-like state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. The study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an entrée to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. This cross-cultural perspective gives us a new lens through which to examine our assumptions.

This book brings together the work of writers from a range of disciplines and cultural traditions to explore the social and political dimensions of sexuality and sexual experience. The chapters reconfigure existing notions of gender and sexuality, linking them to deeper understandings of power, resistance, and emancipation around the globe. They map areas that are currently at the cutting edge of social science writing on sexuality, as well as the complex interface between theory and practice. The book highlights the extent to which populations and communities that once were the object of scientific scrutiny have increasingly demanded the right to speak on their own behalf, as subjects of their own sexualities and agents of their own sexual histories.

Tibetan medicine has come to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. On the one hand, it must retain a sense of cultural authenticity and a connection to Tibetan Buddhism; on the other hand, it must be proven efficacious and safe according to biomedical standards, often through clinical research. Recently, Tibetan medicine has found a place within the multi-billion-dollar market for complementary, traditional, and herbal medicines as people around the world seek alternative paths to wellness. Healing Elements explores Tibetan medicine within diverse settings, from rural schools and clinics in the Nepal Himalaya to high-tech factories and state-supported colleges in the People’s Republic of China. This multi-sited ethnography explores how Tibetan medicines circulate as commercial goods and gifts, as target therapies, and as panacea for biosocial ills. Through an exploration of efficacy—What does it mean to say that Tibetan medicine “works”?—this book illustrates a biopolitics of traditional medicine in the twenty-first century. Healing Elements examines the ways in which traditional medicine interacts with biomedicine: from patient-healer relationships and the cultural meanings ascribed to affliction to the wider circumstances in which practitioners are trained, healing occurs, and medicines are made, evaluated, and used. As such, it examines the meaningful, if contested, translations of science and healing that occur within and across distinct social ecologies.

This study examines the role of today's Russian Orthodox Church in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Russia has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV infection in the world—80 percent from intravenous drug use—and the Church remains its only resource for fighting these diseases. The book takes the reader into a Church-run treatment center where, along with self-transformational and religious approaches, it explores broader anthropological questions—of morality, ethics, what constitutes a “normal” life, and who defines it as such. The book argues that this rare Russian partnership between sacred and political power carries unintended consequences: even as the Church condemns the influence of globalization as the root of the problem it seeks to combat, its programs are cultivating citizen-subjects ready for self-governance and responsibility, and better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.

The Huang Di nei jing su wen, known familiarly as the Su wen, is a seminal text of ancient Chinese medicine, yet until now there has been no comprehensive, detailed analysis of its development and contents. At last, the author offers entry into this still-vital artifact of China's cultural and intellectual past. He traces the history of the Su wen to its origins in the final centuries b.c.e., when numerous authors wrote short medical essays to explain the foundations of human health and illness on the basis of the newly developed vessel theory. The author examines the meaning of the title and the way the work has been received throughout Chinese medical history, both before and after the eleventh century, when the text as it is known today emerged. His survey of the contents includes discussions of the yin-yang and five-agents doctrines, the perception of the human body and its organs, qi and blood, pathogenic agents, concepts of disease and diagnosis, and a variety of therapies, including the new technique of acupuncture. An extensive appendix offers a detailed introduction to the complicated climatological theories of Wu yun liu qi (“five periods and six qi”), which were added to the Su wen by Wang Bing in the Tang era. In an epilogue, the author writes about the break with tradition and the innovative style of thought represented by the Su wen.

In the face of the world's disorders, moral concerns have provided a powerful ground for developing international as well as local policies. This book draws on case materials from France, South Africa, Venezuela, and Palestine to explore the meaning of humanitarianism in the contexts of immigration and asylum, disease and poverty, disaster and war. It traces and analyzes recent shifts in moral and political discourse and practices—what it terms “humanitarian reason”—and shows how humanitarianism is confronted by inequality and violence. Illuminating the tensions and contradictions in humanitarian government, the book reveals the ambiguities confronting states and organizations as they struggle to deal with the intolerable. This critique of humanitarian reason, respectful of the participants involved but lucid about the stakes they disregard, offers theoretical and empirical foundations for a political and moral anthropology.

This book tells the story of an early twentieth-century undertaking, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's project to collect thousands of embryos for scientific study. The book blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history of specimen collecting. In the process, it illuminates how a hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo collecting project—which the book follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to China—most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the 1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of “ourselves unborn,” and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we came to be. The book explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, she sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still-controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean.

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of by them. Illness has changed in the postmodern era—roughly the period since World War II—as dramatically as technology, transportation, and the texture of everyday life. Exploring these changes, this book tells the story, or stories, of what goes into making the postmodern experience of illness different, perhaps unique. Even as it decries the overuse and misuse of the term “postmodern,” it shows how brightly ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism illuminate one another in modern culture. Modern medicine traditionally separates disease—an objectively verified disorder—from illness, a patient's subjective experience. Postmodern medicine, the book says, can make no such clean distinction; instead, it demands a biocultural model, situating illness at the crossroads of biology and culture. Maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder signal our awareness that there are biocultural ways of being sick. The biocultural vision of illness not only blurs old boundaries but also offers a new and infinitely promising arena for investigating both biology and culture. In many ways, the book leads us to understand our experience of the world differently.

Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation's jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. This book explores how jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of incarcerated pregnant women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them. The book describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. It argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish, rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women's lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.