Traces the fascinating history of scientific film during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and shows that early experiments with cinema are important precedents of contemporary medical techniques such as ultrasound.

A fascinating discussion of the cultural context and social impact of medical imaging practices.

Lupton′s newest edition of Medicine as Culture is more relevant than ever. Trudy Rudge, Professor of Nursing, University of Sydney A welcome update of a text that has become a mainstay of the medical sociologist′s library. Alan Radley, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough University Medicine as Culture introduces students to a broad range of cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, using examples that emphasize bodies and visual images. Lupton′s core contrast between lay perspectives on illness and medical power is a useful beginning point for courses teaching health and illness from a socio-cultural perspective. Arthur Frank, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary Medicine as Culture is unlike any other sociological text on health and medicine. It combines perspectives drawn from a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, social history, cultural geography, and media and cultural studies. The book explores the ways in which medicine and health care are sociocultural constructions, ranging from popular media and elite cultural representations of illness to the power dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship. The Third Edition has been updated to cover new areas of interest, including: - studies of space and place in relation to the body - actor-network theory as it is applied in research related to medicine - The internet and social media and how they contribute to lay health knowledge and patient support - complementary and alternative medicine - obesity and fat politics. Contextualising introductions and discussion points in every chapter makes Medicine as Culture, Third Edition a rigorous yet accessible text for students. Deborah Lupton is an independent sociologist and Honorary Associate in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney.

The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations. The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice. Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine.

2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title How do concepts and constructions of the body shape people's experiences of agency and objectification within medical culture? As an object of scrutiny, the medicalized body occupies center stage in the work of doctors, nurses, medical examiners, and other medical professionals who mediate broader cultural understandings of pathology, illness, and the various physical transformations associated with life and death. The Body in Medical Culture explores how the body functions within medical culture and examines the metaphors and models of the body used to understand medical phenomena, including disease, diagnostic practices, wellness, anatomy, surgery, and medical research. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines engage representations of bodies, including polio and masculinity, sex reassignment surgery, drug marketing, endography, "designer vaginas," and hospital humor in order to challenge the normalcy of the passively objectified medicalized body.

In Mass Hysteria, Rebecca Kukla examines the present-day medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. In the late-eighteenth century, the configuration of the maternal body underwent a radical transformation and the two maternal bodies that emerged out of this transformation still govern our imagination and rituals surrounding pregnancy and lactation. Exploring the history and the current life of these two maternal bodies within medical institutions, popular culture, and politics, Kukla offers a critical assessment of the lived repercussions of these ideological figures and practices for contemporary women's and infants' health and well-being.

Medical Materialities investigates possible points of cross-fertilisation between medical anthropology and material culture studies, and considers the successes and limitations of both sub-disciplines as they attempt to understand places, practices, methods, and cultures of healing. The editors present and expand upon a definition of ‘medical materiality’, namely the social impact of the agency of often mundane, at times non-clinical, materials within contexts of health and illness, as caused by the properties and affordances of this material. The chapters address material culture in various clinical and biomedical contexts and in discussions that link the body and healing. The diverse ethnographic case studies provide valuable insight into the way cultures of medicine are understood and practised.

When his teenage son Christopher, brain-damaged in an auto accident, developed a 105-degree fever following weeks of unconsciousness, John Campbell asked the attending physician for help. The doctor refused. Why bother? The boy’s life was effectively over. Campbell refused to accept this verdict. He demanded treatment and threatened legal action. The doctor finally relented. With treatment, Christopher’s temperature—which had eventually reached 107.6 degrees—subsided almost immediately. Soon afterward the boy regained consciousness and was learning to walk again. This story is one of many Wesley J. Smith recounts in his award-winning classic critique of the modern bioethics movement, Culture of Death. In this newly updated edition, Smith chronicles how the threats to the equality of human life have accelerated in recent years, from the proliferation of euthanasia and the Brittany Maynard assisted suicide firestorm, to the potential for “death panels” posed by Obamacare and the explosive Terri Schiavo controversy. Culture of Death reveals how more and more doctors have withdrawn from the Hippocratic Oath and how “bioethicists” influence policy by posing questions such as whether organs may be harvested from the terminally ill and disabled. This is a passionate yet coolly reasoned book about the current crisis in medical ethics by an author who has made “the new thanatology” his consuming interest.

Groundbreaking perspectives on disability in culture and the arts that shed light on notions of identity and social marginality

Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called “humoral medical traditions,” as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of “balance” in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to the present, the volume revisits “harmony” and “holism” as main characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances. Balance need not connoteegalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in those bodies?