As the global pandemic escalates, health services are rapidly changing, creating tension between reproductive rights and safeguarding against COVID-19 spread, revealing the question: what is essential and what is not?
As the world grapples with the growing threat of COVID-19, health systems are being put to the test, rushing to radically reconfigure themselves in time to absorb a large influx …
I teach an undergraduate course called Cultural diversity, structural barriers, and multilingualism in clinical and healing encounters at the University of Chicago. The title is a mouthful, and the course can be thought of as one that combines medical anthropological perspectives and a social determinants of health framework. A social determinants of health framework examines the “causes of the causes” …
I recently participated in a radio talk show on the topic of disaster capitalism and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Is the COVID-19 pandemic a disaster? If it is, how does it compare to other disasters that anthropologists have written about? Might the lessons learned from other disasters, like the Hurricane Katrina recovery in New Orleans, be useful in understanding the current …
In this time of apocalyptic “shelter in place” orders, school closures with impromptu home-schooling, and toilet paper shortages, everyone is asked and admonished to practice “social distancing”. By this, public health professionals mean people should stay home except for essential tasks, keep 6 feet distance from each other, wash hands frequently, and cover coughs. These measures can slow the spread …
Case Studies in Social Medicine is a new series in the New England Journal of Medicine that began in 2018 and concluded in March of 2020, totaling 15 brief cases along with an introduction and conclusion. Authored by a group of clinicians and scholars in the social sciences and humanities, each piece is an attempt to use “the case” to …
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In early 2016, people across the United States became aware of a new threat—Zika virus. A New York Times article that April featured a description of the discovery of Zika virus in “a remote Ugandan lab” in the 1940s.[1] But while that story acknowledged the contributions of scientists in Uganda, it mistook the laboratory …