Medical anthropology quarterly
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Historical Article
What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop.
This article examines the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It argues that we urgently need to look beyond the virus if we want to understand the real seriousness of what is happening today. How did we end up in a space of thinking, acting, and feeling that has normalized extremes and is based on the assumption that biological life is an absolute value separate from politics? The author suggests that today's fear is fueled by mathematical disease modeling, neoliberal health policies, nervous media reporting, and authoritarian longings.
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Hydroxychloroquine Controversies: Clinical Trials, Epistemology, and the Democratization of Science.
The claim that anti-malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID-19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and the state in regulating pharmaceuticals, patients' activism, and the collective production of medical knowledge. This article follows the trajectory of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as anti-COVID-19 drugs, focusing on the reception of views of their main scientific promoter, the French infectious disease specialist, Didier Raoult. The surprising career of these drugs, our text proposes, is fundamentally a political event, not in the narrow sense of engaging specific political fractions, but in the much broader sense of the politics of public participation in science.
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This article draws on ethnographic research on the implementation of Vermont's 2013 medical aid-in-dying (AID) law to explore a fundamental paradox: While public discourse characterizes AID as a mechanism for achieving an individually controlled autonomous death, the medico-legal framework that organizes it enlists social support and cultivates dependencies. Therefore, while patients pursuing AID may avoid certain types of dependency-such as those involved in bodily care-the process requires them to affirm and strengthen other bureaucratic, material, and affective forms. ⋯ I argue that assisted dying offers an opportunity to resist dominant U. S. cultural narratives that view dependency in purely negative terms and reimagine the relationships between disability, dependency, and care at the end of life.
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Cancer graphic narratives, I argue, are part of a medical imaginary that includes representations of difference and biomedical technology that engage Fassin's (2009) concept of biolegitimacy. Framed in three parts, the argument first draws on discourses about cancer graphic narratives from graphic medicine scholars and authors to demonstrate a construction of universal suffering. ⋯ Autobiographical graphic narrative as a creative genre that seeks to give voice to individual illness experiences in the context of biomedicine raises anthropological questions about the interplay between the ordinary and biolegitmate. Cancer graphic narratives deconstruct the big events to demonstrate the ordinary ways that a life constructed as different becomes valued through access to medical technologies.
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Me: Were you born deaf? Kwame Osae: Yes, I was born deaf. Me: How come? You have hearing parents, right? [Being born deaf is usually linked to having deaf parents] Kwame Osae: (slightly confused) I don't know… maybe because of witches. Me: Ama Korkor [Kwame's younger deaf sister] told me that she was born hearing. ⋯ I reminded her that she once told me that she was born hearing. Ama Korkor: Yes, I don't know that myself… but my mother told me that I was hearing as a baby… This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.