Abstract: It is known through anthropological literature that African countries are distinguished by a category of medicine that many specialists call ethnomedicine or traditional African medicine. Faced with biomedicine, ethnomedicine has often been relegated to the background in the resolution of health-related problems. However, ethnomedicine resurfaces in African countries, particularly in Cameroon, when there is no biomedical solution to a …
Tag Archives: health
Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands
Medico-legal borderlands?
What is this nebulous sounding compound concept, “medico-legal borderlands”? How has it been used by social scientists whose ethnographic studies scratch at itches in the intersecting areas of human health and illness and the organization and production of health care systems?
Through a collection of four essays curated for this Somatosphere series, we invite readers to join us …
Joseph Dumit’s Drugs for Life
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health
by Joseph Dumit
Duke University Press, 2012. pp. 280.
Since the 1970s, scholarly work on pharmaceuticals has long engaged a number of concerns, debates and controversies: the socialities and politics of consumption, the commercialization of the life sciences, and restricted access to life-saving medicines as a result of global patent and …
Web Roundup: Accidents and myths
What role do accidents play in determining our lives and histories? What, even, is an accident? How does something come to be thought of as “accidental”? This month’s Web Roundup features stories on accidents and their aftermath.
Starting us off, Slate has an excellent article about Phineas Gage, the most famous patient of neurosurgery ever. For those who don’t …