Medical Materialities

Aaron Parkhurst is a lecturer in Biosocial Medical Anthropology at University College London, UK, with a focus on the anthropology of the human body, and the anthropology and bioethics of emerging technology.Timothy Carroll is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at University College London, UK, studying end-of-life and post-mortem care amongst Orthodox Christians in Britain.

• 1. Introduction: A Genealogy of Medical Materialities 2. Of flesh and mesh: Time, materiality and health in surgical recovery 3. From attitudes to materialities: Understanding bowel control for colorectal cancer patients in London 4. The life course of labia: female genital cutting in Somaliland 5. On ‘Being the Problem’: The Ontological Choreography of the Infertile Male 6. Blood, Lungs and Passports 7. ‘Time for Tea’: Tea Practices and Care in a British Hospice 8. Regenerative Medicine Event’: Cells, Soybeans, and a Repurposing of Ritual in Japan 9. The Form that Flattens 10. On Becoming a Vegetable: Life, Nature and Healing for a Hylozoic Cult 11. Making the Body Local: The suburban shitizen 12. Of smoke and unguents: Health affordances of sacred materiality 13. How photographs ‘empower’ bodies to act differently 14. Response: Medical materialities, (post)genomics and the biosocial 15. Response: Medical materialities, collections & artefacts

"This book serves to fill the gap between medical anthropology and material studies in medicine and makes the two subdisciplines mutually supportive fields. It is a must-have book in anthropology, medicine, and material studies." - A. Y. Lee, George Mason University in Choice