Not only is summer the season of the action-packed blockbuster, but apparently it is also the time for special journal issues. Here are a few recent ones you may want to take a look at:

A recent issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry is devoted to the Anthropology of Psychiatry. Some really excellent ethnographic accounts here as well as a commentary by Allan Young.

Anthropology and Medicine has just run a special issue on ethnography in hospitals and clinical spaces. The articles are drawn from a 2006 conference on hospital ethnography; a recent issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography contains additional papers from this conference.
Both of these issues extend a set of conversations about clinical ethnography and the hospital as a fieldsite which were featured in a 2004 special issue of Social Science and Medicine in edited by Sjaak van der Geest and Kaja Finkler.

Social Science and Medicine is running a special issue on stigma edited by Jennifer Stuber, Ilan Meyer and Bruce Link. For those who are interested, Link wrote a very useful review on stigma as an analytic category a few years ago, co-authored with his colleague at Columbia, Jo Phelan.

A recent issue of Science as Culture is devoted to “Stem Cell Stories.”

Ethos recently ran a special issue devoted to the contribution of Jerome Bruner’s work to anthropology, which should be of particular interest to those working on culture and mind or the links between anthropology and psychology.

Finally, the June issue of Transcultural Psychiatry is a special issue on “The Medical Anthropology of Sensations.” The issue addresses the relationships between neurobiology, culture and personal history in shaping the meaning and experience of sensations and symptoms important to illness and healing.