This month’s Web Roundup is dedicated to the role that legislation and the courts have in promoting or restricting access to medical care. In particular, I will focus briefly on the passage of anti-abortion legislation in the US and a few recent court cases that are testing the limits pharmaceutical patents. While not overtly theoretical in nature, I have found …
Tag Archives: Pharma
A psychiatric research scandal and an accidental activist
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 …
Longing for Sleep: Assessing the Place of Sleep in the 21st Century – Part 1
This article is part of the series: Longing for Sleep
Sleep has been in the news for the past decade or so as a matter of growing concern. Along with this popular, medical and scientific attention, social scientists have been increasingly interested in sleep as an object or process of study. The first major sociological book published on sleep was Simon Williams’ Sleep and Society (Routledge, 2005), after which …
Web Roundup: Reading Literature as Medical Anthropologists
This month’s Web Round-up gathers reviews of recent works of fiction that engage medical anthropological themes. You’ll also find some links to writings about anthropology and fiction from around the blogosphere. This slant toward literary subject matter is inspired by the recent addition of the Top of the Heap column to the Somatosphere family.
Fiction (or memoir) is often the …
Coming of Age on Psychiatric Meds
Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are
by Katherine Sharpe
HarperCollins, 2012
336 pp, US$14.99 paperback
Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up
by Kaitlin Bell Barnett
Beacon Press, 2012
248 pp, US$25.95 hardcover
Remarkably (or perhaps not remarkably at all if we take synchronicity seriously) two books …
Book review: Anne Pollock’s Medicating Race
Medicating Race:Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference
by Anne Pollock
Duke University Press, 2012
280 pp, US$23.95 paperback
Anne Pollock’s new book, Medicating Race, is a meditation on the history and present state of racialized (specifically African American) forms of heart disease. As a history it is particularly interesting, documenting the emergence of the concept of ‘risk …