Introduction At present, we are living through several major, arguably foreseen, historical events and political shifts. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised and further fragmented …
I had just begun my year of social service when I met a patient I will never forget. Let’s call her María. She was around 50 years old…
Introduction Contraceptives are considered ‘the greatest life-saving, poverty ending, women-empowering innovation ever created’ (Gates 2019, 18). ‘Family planners’ – the global constellation of bi…
Social medicine, an approach that centres the social conditions of life as the cause of health and illness, can be thought of as an effort to ‘resocialize’ medicine.…
This essay aims to explore possibilities and challenges for the future of Social Medicine.[1] It is inspired by empirical ethnographic research, as part of a PhD in Collective…
If you fall into a pit, you can climb out, but once you slip from a sheer cliff, you canno…
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Americans became familiar with the idea that people with underlying conditions were at increased risk for severe COVID infections.…
“Three men are constantly speaking to me behind my right ear,” says Pia Oxenvad, a young woman experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It feels like they are standing right behind…
In the final evening of an archival research trip across France last September, I was thrilled to see that a cinema in Quartier Latin was screening Atlantic City…
Though plants are indispensable for human survival, their contributions to human existence and history are often underappreciated. To underline some of the contributions of plants to wider environmen…
I start with the question, why was it necessary, from 2008, for Mondi South Africa to spend R50 million (USD 8 million) a year on a nutrition intervention…
Over the past five years I have been conducting research on everyday eating and the emergence of Non-Communicable Diseases in the West African city of Dakar, Senegal. Working…
Skin, nose, mouth In a remote church building in the Southwest of Kenya, Arthur Ouko was training farmers on ‘responsible use of pesticides.’ He was instilling the importance…
Kinshasa, its traffic and street vendors, receded as we drove past the international airport on the national road following the Congo River. “It’s been recently re-asphalted”, said the…
The identification of aflatoxin in the 1960s troubled plans for Senegalese peanuts. Blamed for the acute poisoning of English poultry fed with Brazilian peanut meal, this fungal metabolite…