Cosmetic surgery is big business. With demand rising, this commercial medical practice has become a modern body custom. To explain the emergence and growth of this demand, Deborah A. Sullivan looks beyond the cultural imperatives of appearance and examines the market dynamics inherent in the business and politics of cosmetic surgery. In so doing, she also considers the effect of commercialization on the medical profession. After reviewing prevailing beauty ideals, Sullivan looks at the social, psychological, and economic rewards and penalties resulting from the way we look. Following a historical overview of the technological advances that made cosmetic surgery possible, she explores the relationship between improved surgical techniques and the resulting increased demand; she also examines the ensuing conflict within the profession over recognition of commercial cosmetic surgery as a specialty. Among the topics covered are sensitive areas such as physician advertising, unregulated practice, and ambulatory surgery, and the consequences of commercialism on medical judgment. Finally, she reveals how physicians and their professional organizations have shaped the ways in which cosmetic surgery is presented in advertisements and women's magazines that would promote patient demand.

In this volume, scholars from philosophy, sociology, history, theology, women’s studies, and law explore the looming ethical and social implications of new biotechnologies that are rapidly making it possible to enhance an individual’s mental and physical attributes in ways previously only imagined. To clarify the issues, the contributors grapple with the central concept of "enhancement" and probe the uses and abuses of the term. Focusing in particular on the moral issues pertaining to cosmetic surgery and cosmetic psychopharmacology (a category which includes Prozac), they also examine notions of identity, authenticity, normality, and complicity. Other essays in this collection address the social ramifications of the new technologies, including the problems of access and fairness.

The Globalization of Health Care is the first book to offer a comprehensive legal and ethical analysis of the most interesting and broadest reaching development in health care of the last twenty years: its globalization. It ties together the manifestation of this globalization in four related subject areas - medical tourism, medical migration (the physician "brain drain"), telemedicine, and pharmaceutical research and development, and integrates them in a philosophical discussion of issues of justice and equity relating to the globalization of health care. The time for such an examination is right. Medical tourism and telemedicine are growing multi-billion-dollar industries affecting large numbers of patients. The U.S. heavily depends on foreign-trained doctors to staff its health care system, and nearly forty percent of clinical trials are now run in the developing world, with indications of as much of a 10-fold increase in the past 20 years. NGOs across the world are agitating for increased access to necessary pharmaceuticals in the developing world, claiming that better access to medicine would save millions from early death at a relatively low cost. Coming on the heels of the most expansive reform to U.S. health care in fifty years, this book plots the ways in which this globalization will develop as the reform is implemented.

What does it mean to live in a time when medical science can not only cure the human body but also reshape it? How should we as individuals and as a society respond to new drugs and genetic technologies? Sheila and David Rothman address these questions with a singular blend of history and analysis, taking us behind the scenes to explain how scientific research, medical practice, drug company policies, and a quest for peak performance combine to exaggerate potential benefits and minimize risks. They present a fascinating and factual story from the rise of estrogen and testosterone use in the 1920s and 1930s to the frenzy around liposuction and growth hormone to the latest research into the genetics of aging. The Rothmans reveal what happens when physicians view patients’ unhappiness and dissatisfaction with their bodies—short stature, thunder thighs, aging—as though they were diseases to be treated. The Pursuit of Perfection takes us from the early days of endocrinology (the belief that you are your hormones) to today’s frontier of genetic enhancements (the idea that you are your genes). It lays bare the always complicated and sometimes compromised positions of science, medicine, and commerce. This is the book to read before signing on for the latest medical fix.