Figuring a Grotesque Norm
1954 Homunculus: Penfield Archives, Osler Library of the History of MedicineDuring the midwife-hosted antenatal class Cath attended in a private hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, where she would eventually give birth, pregnant women were encouraged to name the kind of birth they wanted. They were presented with three options: “natural all the way with no medication”, “natural but open to medication”, or “elective caesarean”. The ‘choice’ women were expected …
Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care
by David S. Jones
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, 336 pages.
My first encounter with David S. Jones’ Broken Hearts was in April of 2016. I had packed it in my carry-on luggage as on-plane entertainment while traveling to Minneapolis, MN for the eighty-ninth annual meeting of the American Association …
On July 3 of this year, the face became an “organ”. Changes to US Federal health policy came into effect, moving face transplantation into the jurisdiction of medical procedures governed and administrated by the agencies that oversee the US national transplant system – the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). This policy …
I barely slept the night before my first day of fieldwork in the OR. As a kid I had accompanied my brother to the emergency room and watched a surgeon remove shards of glass from his lower legs. The removal wasn’t bad. But when the suturing began, I got dry mouthed and over-warm and nearly fell out of my plastic …
Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil
Duke University Press, 2010, 321pp $24.95 paperback
In Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, Alexander Edmonds situates plastic surgery within the medical, economic and psychological landscape of consumer capitalism in modern Brazil, unveiling a specific and intriguing socio-medical discourse of the “right to …