The sleep experiment, back in Chicago in 1992… was that really more than 25 years ago?
In that experiment he could locate the seed of what would become of him—and millions of others. It was a study of night shift work, when it could still be called that. Maximizing labor efficiency by regulating bodies. Today, it seems as if the …
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, editors
Intellect Ltd./University of Chicago Press, 2016, 256 pages, 500 color plates
The first reaction to an encounter with Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa is likely to be …
Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital
by Alice Street
Duke University Press, 2014, 204 pages
Social anthropologist Alice Street’s first book is a sensitive ethnography of personhood and recognition in Madang Hospital, an under-resourced provincial hospital in Papua New Guinea. The book shows how doctors, nurses, and patients endeavor to make …
Last fall, a group of researchers – mostly biological anthropologists and sleep researchers – published a study of three ‘pre-industrial’ communities, one in Latin America, two in Africa, and claimed that based on their data, consolidated nightly sleep is a human norm, inferring that it is the product of natural selection. The media picked up the research findings, and I …
[Chagas disease in Argentina. Scientific research, social problems and health policies]
Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina. 2010. 360 pages.
“Mal de Chagas” is a disease that affects 2.5 million people in Argentina and 8 million in Latin America. Caused by the parasite …
An earlier version of this article appeared on Pharmalot.
The University of Minnesota has turned me into an activist against it. Let me confess right away that this is not a role for which I am naturally suited. I have never staged a protest or addressed a rally. Nor have I ever marched with a sign. On the occasions when …