HIV Letter
PIA KEELY-JOHNSON Dear Gavin Williamson, I am a queer woman living in London who, like more than 18.9 million people1 who sat down to watch Russell Davies’ hit show …
Tag: medical anthropology
Eating Disorders, Education, and TikTok
EMILIE THOMPSON 28th February 2021 Dear Mrs Murdoch, Please let me express my enormous gratitude for the work you and your team continue to conduct in the face o…
An Epidemic of Loneliness
PEPE WEISCHER Dear Mr Spahn, The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has strained the capacity of the German health system in unprecedented ways, but it seems to me that one…
A Letter for Malcolm Reed
TANYA SHARMA Dear Professor Malcolm Reed, (Lead Co-Chair of the Medical Schools Council), I am a medical student in the UK writing to you to discuss the teaching…
A Letter to Tedros A. Ghebreyesus
AY NASSIMOLDINA Dear Dr Tedros A. Ghebreyesus, The world is in a vulnerable state right now, and we have trusted you with the World Health Organization to lead…
A Letter to Andrew Selous
SHOLA AJAO Dear Mr Andrew Selous, It is unfortunate that I find myself writing to you again during these unprecedented times. As you may recall, I wrote July…
Fighting Inequality by Improving NHS Dental and Oral Care
MAXINE PEPPER 22nd March 2021 Dear Sir Stevens, RE: Fighting inequality by improving NHS dental and oral care The COVID-19 pandemic …
Advocacy Letters: Anthropological Calls for Public and Global Health Change
Series Introduction CARRIE RYAN For the next few weeks, the UCL Medical Anthropology blog will run a special series called ‘Advocacy Letters: Anthropological Ca…
A Tale of Two [Unvaxed] Women
We needed to find a new plumber. I called around. The first business that seemed willing to clean our boiler and replace a problematic hose spigot had availability…
Understanding My Mom’s Unorthodox Healing Practices
Sheets of newspaper cover a portion of the floor of our house in Manila, and on top of those thin pieces of paper sits a white candle, a…
Swarming Syphilis: On the Reality of Data
(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) Treponema pallidum spirochetes under microscope using a modified Steiner silver stain. Obtained from the…
Unlikely Blessings: A poem on hope, despair and periwinkle
This poem, written fifteen years ago as my youngest son began (thankfully successful) chemotherapy for a rare immune system disease, was recently published for the first time by S…
Boob Boxes: Post-Mastectomy Prosthetics and the Artifice of Breast Cancer
I chose to go flat. But I almost wasn’t allowed to. This is largely due to the unacknowledged psychological tension that underlies deeply gendered illnesses: that it is…
The Racial Thinking behind ALS Diagnosis
Beliefs about which bodies can and cannot develop certain diseases risk rebiologizing race in genomic research and care. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that typical…
Medical anthropology applied to education in socio-health professions: From the enchantment of technology to the enchantment of the encounter by Viviana L. Toro Matuk
“If you want to understand what a science is, you should look for the first instance not at its theories and its findings, and certainly not at what…
Emergent Anthropology: Reimagining U.S. Medical Anthropology in Theory and Practice by Ellen Rubinstein
The American Anthropological Association website identifies four subfields of anthropology (archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic) and reserves a separate section for “applied and practicing …
Doing and Seeing: Cultivating a “Fractured Habitus” through Reflexive Clinician Ethnography by William Schlesinger
Introduction The tension between critical theoretical innovation and on-the-ground, practical application has animated intense debate in medical anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1990). Epistemological…
Troubled Togetherness: Visually Impaired People’s Unsettling and Tiresome Journey towards Community Belonging
ANNAMARIA DALL’ANESE The word ‘community’ has heart-warming connotations of mutual support and reciprocal understanding. The sense of belonging that stems from being integrated into a social world…
The Thinness of Care: The Promise of Medical Anthropology in MD/PhD Training by Joshua Franklin
In the mid-twentieth century, recognizing the growing need for innovations born of clinical experience, pathways for training MD-PhD physician-scientists emerged in the hopes that this hybrid trainin…
Medical Anthropology and Practice of Medicine in Health Issues by Awah Kum Tchouaffi
Abstract: It is known through anthropological literature that African countries are distinguished by a category of medicine that many specialists call ethnomedicine or traditional African medicine. F…
Disrupting medical anthropology: Views from Kenya and Cameroon on how to build a more inclusive discipline by Moïse Mvetumbo
Medical anthropologists often strive to disrupt typical public health and medical discourses, in part by questioning the broader applicability of individualized psychological concepts and biomedical …
Working in a Fracture Zone: Learning to Research Mental Health from Multiple Cultures by Gerald P McKinley
We are an ensemble cast. As such, it is perhaps appropriate that one of the first places where we all came together as a team had at one…
Introduction: Working Definitions: Making and Unmaking “Medical Anthropology” around the World by Elizabeth Durham
Anthropology’s interest in health, illness, prevention, and treatment is longstanding and increasingly robust. In this era of medical development, epidemics and pandemics, and debates in both the oft…
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…