Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq
Stanford University Press, 2017. 239 pp.
Every year, tens of thousands of Iraqi patients leave their country seeking healthcare, and Iraqi physicians move abroad seeking asylum and work. Omar Dewachi writes elsewhere about this crisis and the “therapeutic geographies”* it sets in motion, but in his book Ungovernable …
Welcome back to the “First Thousand Days of Life” Somatosphere series. Here we continue to explore the ways that a global health initiative driven by new findings in epigenetics and neuroscience and by a reframing of theories about health and disease in terms of developmental origins shape ideas about (global) health and population futures, invigorate campaigns, and take …
Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy
University of California Press, 2014, 288 pages.
Exploring the political entailments of rehabilitating “victims of human trafficking” in Italy, Migrants in Translation speaks to the often puzzling disjuncture between recent anthropological and public discourses concerning migrant care and integration: while anthropology’s critiques have led, …
On January 17th 2014, Catherine Eagles, a federal judge for the Middle District of North Carolina, struck down as unconstitutional a portion of North Carolina’s 2011 Women’s Right to Know Act. The portion in question would have required abortion providers in the state to perform an ultrasound and display and describe the images presented to every woman seeking an …
A few months ago, the independent Spanish online newspaper El Diario published a cartoon entitled “Ebola in Madrid”. It showed a health worker, camouflaged in a green protection suit, wearing a white head shield and goggles, leaning over a patient almost completely hidden under the sheets of the hospital bed. The huge hospital room is deserted and empty, …
Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba
Duke University Press, 2012
288 pgs., US $24.95 (paperback)
Reviewed by Amy Cooper (University of Chicago)
In Revolutionary Medicine, P. Sean Brotherton presents a rich ethnographic analysis of health and medicine in Cuba since the late 1990s, examining state medical institutions, the everyday practices of doctors, …