Tommies: a very British haunt? by Frances Williams
Designed by: okb-buro.com/ Earlier this year, the world became familiar with the facade of Britain’s St Thomas’ Hospital when, in late March, it became the backdrop for breaking…
Tag: Features
Writing Life No. 1: An interview with Rachel Prentice by Andrea Wojcik
Figure 1: Rachel’s writing space with friend Jasper (2007-2019) (Photograph by Rachel Prentice) Rachel E. Prentice is a no muss, no fuss anthropologist of medicine, technology, and the…
The Limits of Warmth: Cultural Adaptation and the Politics of Temperature in a Bolivian Hospital by Gabriela Elisa Morales
In the small municipal hospital in the Bolivian highland town of Machacamarca (a pseudonym), the chilly air of the Andes seeps into the building, traveling through the thin…
Birth cohorts, biosocial theory, and the politics of developmental disruption by Dominique Béhague
How and with what consequences do young people push up against standardized views of “normal” and “healthy” development? To what extent can young people’s attempts to disrupt developmental…
Wounded Attachments: Intimacy, Infrastructure, and Harm in the National Public Hospital by Livia Garofalo
The first thing you see from the highway is a massive building. The Hospital is simply enormous. In front of the Hospital plaza is a roundabout. In the…
The Hospital Multiple: Introduction by Janina Kehr
Since COVID-19 has come to haunt the globe, hospitals in all their guises have featured centrally in the pandemic response. As the flagships of health systems, hospitals have…
Book forum: Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life by Martha Lincoln
Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017) received the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) at the 2019…
Interpreting Sexuality: Intellectually Disabled People and “Special” Educators in India by Shruti Vaidya
“Why does she like putting the glass bottle near her pee-hole? She couldn’t talk and tell us what was going on…what did she exactly want? What was in…
Ageless: Reflections on Lawrence Cohen’s No Aging in India by Bharat Jayram Venkat
Two decades ago, Lawrence Cohen’s No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things challenged the ways in which we think about aging and senility,…
Reshaping the bulimic self by Leonie Mol
The current clinical and social explanations of bulimia in the United Kingdom are based upon two premises: 1) that bulimia is a derivative of anorexia, and 2) that…
Becoming ‘not ready’: the case of the moving threshold in a dementia prevention trial by Natassia Brenman
In a behavioural testing room of a clinical research facility, a well-dressed, white-haired woman is undergoing a battery of cognitive, neurological, and physiological tests. The facility, flanked by…
Ludwik Fleck where are you now that we need you? Covid-19 and the genesis of epidemiological facts by Ilana Löwy
Tests for Covid-19 and the politics of big numbers We are incessantly flooded with data on the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. WHO and the Johns Hopkins coronavirus…
Mourning while fighting for justice: The first months of the NOI DENUNCEREMO association, Bergamo, Italy by Chiara Alfieri
This post was co-authored by members of CoMeSCov program who contributed to the development of research questions, data collection tools and data analysis: Firmin Kra, Francesca Mininel, Fleur…
Ethnomedicinal Practices and Behavioral Changes During Deadly Disease Outbreaks: A Commentary and Lesson from Cameroon by Ivo Ngade
In mid-2014, six months after the death of patient zero, the two-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou in Guinea, there were frequent reports of Ebola spikes across Guinea…
The subjects of digital psychiatry by Dörte Bemme
Giorgia Lupi/Stefanie Posavec (2014), MOMA “Dear Data, Week 8, A Week of Phone Addiction” All authors contributed equally to this essay Imagine a room full of research assistants…
Paying attention: Diagnosis, values, and meaning-making in the ADHD clinic by Angela Marques Filipe
Attention, as you know, is the basic faculty, the mother faculty of what we commonly call intelligence. Those who play a role in education must, above all, provoke…
Janne Heederik: The Voluntarisation of Welfare in Manchester: A Blessing and a Burden
As a result of welfare reform and continuing budget cuts, social service agencies in the UK have struggled to make ends meet and match the still-growing demand on…
The ‘truth’ about ALS: Reconciling bias, motives, and etiological gaps by Chelsey Carter
In February of 2019, I was giving a talk in New Haven, Connecticut. My paper was an overview of my research, titled “Is It a ‘White Disease’? ALS,…
Adam James Moore: The human cost of city upgrading in ‘pro-poor’ Medellín
On 1st March 2018, a group of protestors blocked a dual-carriageway in front of Acevedo Metro (and Metro cable line) Station in the North of Medellín, Colombia. Those…
The Two Singapores: From the Worker’s View by Wahid Al Mamun
“The Two Singapores” is an ongoing interview miniseries run by Somatosphere to interrogate Singapore’s COVID-19 response, in particular in its handling of the explosion of cases among migrant…
‘A world that counts’: The rise of infographics in global maternal health campaigns by Margaret E. MacDonald
Infographics have become a ubiquitous feature of the contemporary global health landscape, crowding the presentations and exhibition halls of conferences, the pages of annual reports, and the website…
The Body Audible: From Vocal Biomarkers to a Phrenology of the Throat by Beth Semel
How do mental illnesses sound? What are the stakes of using machines to render the signs of psychiatric suffering audible? These questions drive the teams of psychiatric and…
The Two Singapores: On The Ground (from Home) by Wahid Al Mamun
“The Two Singapores” is an ongoing interview miniseries run by Somatosphere to interrogate Singapore’s COVID-19 response, in particular in its handling of the explosion of cases among migrant…
The Two Singapores: Rethinking Migrant Domestic Care Work in COVID-19 by Wahid Al Mamun
“The Two Singapores” is an ongoing interview miniseries run by Somatosphere to interrogate Singapore’s COVID-19 response, in particular in its handling of the explosion of cases amo…