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This paper explores physicians' responses to the suicide of a female surgeon colleague in order to detail the cultural patterning of the problem of suicide within biomedicine. More broadly, it argues that suicide provides an exemplary case of reckoning with uncertainty. Data sources include 124 hours of person-centered and semistructured interviews with 65 individuals, including 54 physicians, 28 of whom are female surgeons. I argue that the cultural model of suicide articulated by physicians reflects an ultimately ineffective strategy for managing suicide's multisource uncertainty, with the suicide of a colleague exposing the moral and affective entailments of a limit case of prognostication. Examining patterns in physician responses to suicide, I define "bewilderment" as a state of having no means of getting to know, and I detail the ways in which physicians' aversive reaction to bewilderment undermine knowledge acquisition. I describe suicide's distinct challenges to biomedicine's social power, including suicide's contestation of narratives about the future. Finally, I raise questions about the degree to which biomedical framings of suicide may undermine the ability of biomedical actors to develop effective interventions to address it. Exploring responses to suicide as a form of cultural production can illustrate fundamental tensions about uncertainty and causality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While vigorously exploring new and improved external protection technologies, the US military has long focused on ways to internally armor the soldier through biomedical interventions. The goal of these projects is to create a new kind of soldier with different expectations of performance, capabilities, and survivability. Much of the focus of US military biomedical performance-enhancement programs is on the impact of environmental threats and infectious disease and how soldiers break down due to these stressors. Zeroing in on this trend, I examine two US military biomedical armor projects intended to protect soldiers against the environment and disease. Employing a kind of anticipatory military biomedicine, both projects call for the embedding of "inbuilt" and "unseen" biomedical technologies and prophylaxes in the body of the soldier. As I discuss here, US military biomedical research is intended to provide soldiers with protections to allow them to deploy in any condition or climate around the world and to protect them from any and all pathogens they might encounter on the battlefield. As the US military increasingly sees the entire globe as a battlefield, it must anticipate, imagine, and design new ways to protect soldiers in order to make them deployable anywhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider whether the term "medical anthropology" is serving us as well as it could be and whether the term "health anthropology" could be more appropriate. We argue that medical anthropology is used metonymically; that is, it is a part of the field that is used, inaccurately, to describe the whole. Anthropologists research, teach, and consult in health work in far broader contexts than the term "medical" implies. Continuing to describe ourselves as medical anthropologists privileges biomedicine over other conceptualizations of health and saddles us with the risk of making ethnocentric assumptions about health, wellness, and unwellness into the field. It reproduces a focus on the individual, which is not reflective of many health and healing systems. Given the maturity, diversity, and complexity of our subdiscipline, we ask whether "health anthropology" may be a more accurate description of our collective endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we situate the recent debates over the genetic, genealogical, and medical databases that are being constructed for the population of Iceland in their domestic context, focusing on the contribution of anthropology to the understanding of central issues at the intersection of biomedicine and society. Modern biotechnology and bioinformatics have opened up an entirely new world in which a multitude of different kinds of human body components as well as genetic and medical information can be isolated and used for commercial, medical, and scientific purposes. While these developments are generally met with criticism and opposition, responses vary from one context to another. The perspective of moral landscapes recently developed in economic anthropology is helpful for understanding the topography of moral debates and determining the options available for informing public decisions on these contested issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]