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In India, where there is no centralized medical records system, biomedical care providers rely on families to explain their child's illness and to carry records of any previous treatment the child may have received. Drawing on discussions of documentation, I argue that in the context of medical treatment for pediatric seizures, (1) families collect medical records to enable and shape their child's medical treatment, and (2) such a merging of medical and familial care is necessitated by the nature of their child's illness and the structure of the Indian healthcare system. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Meerut and New Delhi, this paper attends to practices of record keeping to understand the demands biomedical institutions place on families for the treatment of their child's seizures. I examine the creation, maintenance, and movement of medical records to suggest that documents are a point of intersection between medical and kinship practices. They are artifacts of care that can narrate parallel histories of a patient's illness and family-clinician efforts to alleviate a child's suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the testimony of Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian physician who bears witness to his experiences working, living, and suffering under Israeli rule. He presents his story as a doctor's story, drawing on his identity as a medical professional to gain credibility and visibility and to challenge the limited legitimacy of Palestinian grievances. In this paper, I explore his testimony as a medical voice that at once recounts the suffering and loss endured by the Palestinian people and also struggles to negotiate the values associated with being a "reliable" witness. Consequently, I ethnographically examine the social life and reception of his story in Jewish-Israeli publics. In comparison with most Palestinian narratives, Abuelaish's testimony achieved an extremely rare degree of visibility and sympathy, a phenomenon that calls out for analysis. I identify the boundaries that typically render Palestinian grievances invisible to Israeli publics and suggest how medicine's self-proclaimed ethos of neutrality served as a channel for crossing them. Finally, I reflect on the political possibilities and limitations of medical witnessing to render suffering visible and arouse compassion toward those construed as a dangerous/enemy Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the World Health Organization's recent publication WHO Strategy for Traditional Medicine (WHO 2002), this paper examines the historical position of "traditional medicines" at their intersection with the development and modernization of a biomedically based health care system in Turkey. This paper considers how the historical development of Turkey's health care system, as a prominent site for the articulation of the state's broader modernization project, sustained particular formulations of subjectivity and citizenship that were defined in opposition to a set of cultural practices and modes of religious-political authority represented by "traditional medicines." Consequently, projects and policies seeking to formally integrate "complementary" or "alternative" therapies directly confront this past and the various ways in which it is reenacted in constituting the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of two different sickle cell disease and disease/treatment paradigms in two clinics, Children's Hospital West (CHW) and Children's Hospital East (CHE), demonstrates how physicians can influence institutional regimes of truth to improve patient access. Physicians at both clinics, far from simply acquiescing to dominant biomedical paradigms, recognize that their paradigms are in part rhetorical strategies designed to subvert problematic staff biases and perceptions, and to encourage a particular "self-efficacy" ethic in the patients. This paper positions physicians as struggling within the discursive regimes of biomedicine to create an institutional space where the disease and the sickle cell patient matter, and where patients comply with the performative rules of that space. This paper explores how physicians, patients, and institutions collaborate in the construction of sickle cell disease in such a way that biomedicine becomes a plural, as opposed to a singular and oppressive, discursive regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about power, medicine and the identity of the African as a patient of western medicine. From a conventional perspective and as encoded in the current "quest for wholeness" that characterises South African biomedical discourse, the African patient--like any other patient--has always existed as an authentic and subjectified being, whose true attributes and experiences have been denied by the "mechanistic," "reductionistic" and "ethnocentric" practices of clinical medicine. Against this liberal humanist perspective on the body as ontologically independent of power, this paper offers a Foucaultian reading of the African patient as-like any other patient--contingent upon the force relations immanent within and relayed through the clinical practices of biomedicine. A quintessential form of disciplinary micro-power, these fabricate the most intimate recesses of the human body as manageable objects of medical knowledge and social consciousness to make possible the great control strategies of repression, segmentation and liberation that are the usual focus of conventional investigations into the place and function of medicine in society. Since the 1930s when the African body first emerged as a discrete object of a secular clinical knowledge, these have repeatedly transformed the attributes and identity of the African patient, and the paper traces this archaeology of South African clinical perception from then until the 1990s to show how its "quest for wholeness" is not an end point of "discovery" or "liberation," but merely another ephemeral crystallization of socio-medical knowledge in a constantly changing force field of disciplinary power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major challenge of medical anthropology is to assess how biomedicine, as a vaguely-defined set of diverse texts, technologies, and practitioners, shapes the experience of self and body. Through narrative analyses of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 158 pregnant women in southern California, this paper explores how the culture of biomedicine, encountered formally at prenatal care check-ups and informally through diverse media, influences pregnant women's perceptions of appropriate prenatal behavior. In the spirit of recent social scientific work that draws on and challenges Foucauldian insights to explore social relations in medicine, we posit a spectrum of compliance and resistance to biomedical norms upon which individual prenatal practices are assessed. We suggest that pregnancy is, above all, characterized by a split subjectivity in which women straddle the authoritative and the subjugated, the objective and the subjective, and the haptic as well as the optic, in telling and often strategic ways. In so doing, we identify the intersection between the disciplinary practices of biomedicine and the practices of pregnant women as a means of furnishing more fruitful insights into the oft-used term "power" and its roles in constituting social relations in medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aristotle's doctrine on causation identifies four distinct types of cause: formal, efficient, material, and final. Science is said to have differentiated itself from philosophy by concentrating solely on efficient causes. Nonetheless, when applied to narratives of causation, Aristotle's doctrine provides a useful heuristic to explore the issues such as Aboriginal and biomedical perceptions of causal factors for non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. This paper also outlines two divergent causal stories for NIDDM and the associated moral positions regarding the 'righteous' pursuit of health. Biomedical narratives emphasize the role of lifestyle factors, particularly the impact of obesity, in causation. In the case of diabetes, the moral course of action is pursued through lifestyle choices. In contrast, Aboriginal narratives emphasize the role of genetics in causation. These narratives describe diabetes as collectively affecting Aboriginal people - thus identifying Aboriginal people as different. Aboriginal frameworks for health venture beyond the 'efficient' cause of biomedicine and thus the moral pursuit of health within this framework involves returning to an initial state of health and purity through traditional knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores ways in which Chinese healing practices have undergone acculturation in the United States since the early 1970s. Reacting to what is perceived as biomedicine's focus on the physiological, those who describe themselves as favoring a holistic orientation often use the language of "energy blockage" to explain illness, whether thought of as "physical," "emotional," or "spiritual." Acupuncture in particular has been appropriated as one modality with which to "unblock" such conditions, leading to its being used by some practitioners in conjunction with more psychotherapeutic approaches which include valuing the verbalizing of feelings. Some non-Chinese practitioners in the United States, returning to older Chinese texts to develop "an American acupuncture," are reinserting diagnoses eliminated from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) by the People's Republic of China as "superstition." The assumption has been that many such diagnostic categories refer to psychological or spiritual conditions, and therefore may be useful in those American contexts which favor this orientation. Among these categories are those drawn from traditions of demonology in Chinese medicine. What was once a religious category in China turns psychological in the American setting. At the same time, many who use these terms have, since the late 1960s, increasingly conflated the psychological and the religious, the latter being reframed as "spiritual." Thus, this indigenization of Chinese practices is a complex synthesis which can be described as simultaneously medical, psychotherapeutic, and religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]