Medical anthropology quarterly
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I describe the refashioning of a sense of self and identity of a junior officer in the U. S. Army who was injured in Iraq. ⋯ The first focuses on the refashioning of identity through a sports model of rehabilitation emphasizing physical functioning. The second approaches rehabilitation by emphasizing individual interests and the concern of a person who has a future life to develop. I conclude by arguing that understanding the process of rehabilitation from traumatic injury would benefit from a perspective that melds multiple dimensions, taking into account both the physical body and the social world that patients have inhabited and will inhabit.
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Drawing on ethnographic data collected over 13 months of fieldwork in family doctor clinics in Havana from 2004 to 2005, I examine the shifting moral and material economies of Cuban socialist medical practice. In both official ideology and in daily practice, the moral economy of ideal socialist medicine is based on an ethos of reciprocal social exchange-that is, the gift-that informs not only doctors' relationships with the Cuban state and with individual patients but also the state's policies of international medical service to developing nations. ⋯ The gift remains the central metaphor of Cuban medical practice. Nonetheless, as ideologies and practices of gifting and reciprocity encounter an emerging market economy, gifts--whether on the level of the state policies of international humanism or in patient-doctor relations--are open to new significations that highlight the shifting material and moral economies of post-Soviet Cuba.
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In this article, I examine how parents of infants with birth weight of 1000 grams or less in Iceland relate to the questions whether and when treatment for a preterm infant may be withdrawn, and who should make such a decision. Almost all the parents agreed there are categories of infants who should be allowed to die and parents should have a say in such a decision. Inability to take part in human communication was most commonly mentioned as a valid criterion for withdrawal of treatment. ⋯ Parents claimed their right to participate in treatment decisions as emotional experts; the child was theirs and they had to live with the outcome. Their hope in cure was based on faith in medical science and high confidence in the staff of the NICU. Parents also stressed the infant's will to live and referred to alternative knowledge, for instance, derived from "evidence based" spiritism or an interpretation of a dream.
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Historical Article
Carolina in the Carolines: a survey of patterns and meanings of smoking on a Micronesian island.
Tobacco use--especially smoking industrially manufactured cigarettes--kills nearly 5 million people annually and is the leading preventable cause of death worldwide. Tobacco is a widely used global commodity embedded in cultural meanings, and its consumption involves a set of learned, patterned social behaviors. ⋯ To help fill this gap, this article sketches the historical background of tobacco in Micronesia, presents the results of a cross-sectional smoking survey from Namoluk Atoll, and describes contemporary smoking patterns and locally understood symbolic associations of tobacco. Intersections among history, gender, local meanings, the health transition, and the transnational marketing of tobacco are addressed, and cigarette smoking is seen as part of a new syndemic of chronic diseases in Micronesia.