Cristiana Bastos - Böcker

" . . . a coherent and fascinating social analysis of AIDS-related knowledge, examining the social facts of knowledge production and developments interior to communities of science." Medical Humanities Review" . . . a multilayered, composite approach that involves multisited ethnographic research in different spheres of the collective responses to AIDS . . . " —ChoiceThe response to AIDS from various groups in developing knowledge of and about this health crisis is the focus of this revealing work. Rio de Janeiro serves as an observation point for the study of the intersecting worlds of activism, clinical practice, and biomedical research.

This volume on medical tourism includes contributions by anthropologists and historians on a variety of health-seeking modes of travel and leisure. It brings together analyses of recent trends of "medical tourism", such as underinsured middle-class Americans traveling to India for surgery, pious Middle Eastern couples seeking assisted reproduction outside their borders, or consumers of the exotic in search of alternative healing, with analyses of the centuries-old Euro-American tradition of traveling to spas. Rather than seeing these two forms of medical travel as being disparate, the book demonstrates that, as noted in the introduction ‘what makes patients itinerant in both the old and new kind of medical travel is either a perceived shortage or constraint at ‘home’, or the sense of having reached a particular kind of therapeutic impasse, with the two often so intertwined that it is difficult to tell them apart. The constraint may stem from things as diverse as religious injunctions, legal hurdles, social approbation, or seasonal affliction; and the shortage can range from a lack of privacy, of insurance, technology, competence, or enough therapeutic resources that can address issues and conditions that patients have. If these two intertwined strands are responsible for most medical tourism, then which locales seem to have therapeutic resources are those that are either ‘natural,’ in the form of water or climate; legal, in the form of a culture that does not stigmatise patients; or technological and professional, in the form of tests, equipment, or expertise, unavailable or affordable at home; or in the form of novel therapeutic possibilities that promise to resolve irresolvable issues’.This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology & Medicine.

This volume on medical tourism includes contributions by anthropologists and historians on a variety of health-seeking modes of travel and leisure. It brings together analyses of recent trends of "medical tourism", such as underinsured middle-class Americans traveling to India for surgery, pious Middle Eastern couples seeking assisted reproduction outside their borders, or consumers of the exotic in search of alternative healing, with analyses of the centuries-old Euro-American tradition of traveling to spas. Rather than seeing these two forms of medical travel as being disparate, the book demonstrates that, as noted in the introduction ‘what makes patients itinerant in both the old and new kind of medical travel is either a perceived shortage or constraint at ‘home’, or the sense of having reached a particular kind of therapeutic impasse, with the two often so intertwined that it is difficult to tell them apart. The constraint may stem from things as diverse as religious injunctions, legal hurdles, social approbation, or seasonal affliction; and the shortage can range from a lack of privacy, of insurance, technology, competence, or enough therapeutic resources that can address issues and conditions that patients have. If these two intertwined strands are responsible for most medical tourism, then which locales seem to have therapeutic resources are those that are either ‘natural,’ in the form of water or climate; legal, in the form of a culture that does not stigmatise patients; or technological and professional, in the form of tests, equipment, or expertise, unavailable or affordable at home; or in the form of novel therapeutic possibilities that promise to resolve irresolvable issues’.This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology & Medicine.

This edited volume investigates the shaping, suppression, and circulation of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge in colonial Goa, situating these processes within the region’s political, religious, and commercial networks. Spanning from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, the chapters trace developments from Garcia de Orta’s engagement with local plant-based knowledge to the compilation of herbaria used as medical vademecums across Jesuit global networks. The collection also explores the hybrid medical practices in eighteenth-century Goan hospitals, the institutionalisation of medical education, and the contested legitimacy of healing practices during epidemics such as smallpox, plague, and cholera. Rather than framing colonial medicine as a binary between European and Asian systems under a sanitary regime, the contributors draw on earlier historical layers to illuminate the complexities of medical knowledge production in nineteenth-century Goa.