My Errant Uterus
In a time of heightened threats to reproductive rights, a women’s health scholar and mother of two comes face to face with her uterus. ✽ I keep my…
In a time of heightened threats to reproductive rights, a women’s health scholar and mother of two comes face to face with her uterus. ✽ I keep my…
Decades ago, anthropologists dispelled the myth of biological race. Lagging behind in scientific understandings of human diversity, the medical profession is failing its oath to “do no harm.”…
By Peter Versteeg – Have you ever wondered why something happened to you? I hope you haven’t because this question often arises when people are faced with something…
In Care Without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine, Christoph Hanssmann explores the evolution of trans therapeutics and health activism through ethnographic fieldwork conduc…
Public health officials say opioid use and related deaths have reached a crisis point in the U.S. An interview with anthropologist and psychiatrist Helena Hansen unpacks the racial…
Black women in the U.S. are far more likely to die from complications related to pregnancy and birth than White women. Two scholars explore how the discrediting of…
The root of the word morphine is Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Neil Gaiman’s contemporary reimagining of the character in his magnum opus Sandman likewise thrusts upon…
A Swindle Exposed 1913, Chicago: A reporter, assuming the name Edward Donlin, enters a downtown medical establishment that has advertised widely in Midwestern newspapers offering Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s…
In Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity, Wei Yu Wayne Tan considers what it meant to be blind in Tokugawa Japan (from 1600 to 1868), including how a strong guild structure p…
A multidisciplinary poet-scholar and suicide attempt and multi-suicide loss survivor unveils complex anthropological threads that shape suicidal ideation. ✽ Worldwide, most people know someone who ha…
Three researchers discuss the possibilities and problems arising as psychedelic plant medicines, held sacred by many Indigenous communities, move into the global mental health and tourism industries. …
Distant Doctors: A Surgical Theater in Romania – By Cristina A. Pop – Someone has a fondness for purple decor, I decide, as I look around the examination…
A biocultural anthropologist shares new research on the surprising long-term hazards of volcanoes in Iceland—and how to address them. THE RISE OF ICELANDIC VOLCANOES In the fall of…
An archaeologist explains what a 500-year-old horn container found in South Africa illuminates about precolonial Khoisan medical and spiritual knowledges. This article was originally published at The…
An anthropologist’s research with Tlingit communities in Alaska shows they have good reasons to be skeptical about vaccines. They know their history. ✽ New COVID-19 boosters are now…
An interview with anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis digs into abortion rights and reproductive justice after the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. ✽ On June 24, the…
The debate over naming the virus known as monkeypox says a lot about the close—but fraught—relationships between humans and our fellow primates. ✽ The name of the latest…
Opinions about fetal personhood and abortion have fluctuated enormously throughout history and differ in surprising ways between cultures. ✽ After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade…
The following is an autoethnographic comic about my experiences re-understanding a new diagnosis through revisiting Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. (And yes, the final panel is from a…
An anthropologist digs into the origins of a popular story attributed to Margaret Mead about the original sign of civilization. ✽ According to a commonly shared story, the…
According to a commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There…
[no-caption] The Real Tokyo Life/Getty Images Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig.…
Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig. Used with permission of the publisher,…
In 1950, human blood was stored for patient use at a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons In the spring…