{"title":"Uterine Vulnerability: A Lived Experience Response to Endometriosis.","authors":"Caroline Meier Zu Biesen","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2617654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2026.2617654","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, I examine the uterus as an object in relation to endometriosis and the epistemological struggle of sufferers to have their pain taken seriously. Defined by endometrial-<i>like</i> tissue outside the uterus, endometriosis affects multiple organs, causes severe pain, and is often undiagnosed for years. While outsiders frequently describe the condition, patient voices remain marginal. Using illness autoethnography and my experience in Germany, I show how delegitimized embodied knowledge shapes the identify work of coping with endometriosis. Medical gaslighting, stigma, limited literacy, and shame increase dismissal of symptoms and vulnerability. Recognizing the gendered framings of endometriosis can reshape how people cope with it.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146019826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2024-08-02DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2376004
Elspeth Davies
{"title":"Ambivalent Speculations: Learning to Live with Barrett's Esophagus in the UK Using Facebook Support Groups.","authors":"Elspeth Davies","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2376004","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2024.2376004","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on fieldwork in Facebook support groups, in this article I explore how people, now patients, learnt to live with Barrett's esophagus, a risk state or \"precancer\" for a type of esophageal cancer. This diagnosis brought the possibility of both facing and averting cancerous futures into the present. Far from passive recipients, members worked to foreground speculations of \"wanted futures\" in which prompt surveillance successfully prevented cancer deaths, transforming cancer risk into an opportunity for hope. Speculation here was an ambivalent and active process, involving not only the \"observation of potentiality,\" but the opening up and foreclosing of both desirable and undesirable potentialities.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"472-485"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141876311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2025-07-27DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2025.2535997
Shao-Hua Liu
{"title":"Negotiating Identities in the COVID-19 Crisis: The Global-Local Dilemma of Medical Epidemiologists in Taiwan.","authors":"Shao-Hua Liu","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2535997","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2535997","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Taiwan, internationally acclaimed for its early success in COVID-19 control, credits its robust system of medical epidemiologists as pivotal. This article examines how these physicians were caught between the professionalism of global health initiatives and the challenges of local governance in a structurally unequal world. These dynamics shaped their roles as both members of transnational networks upholding professional principles and national scientists representing a state eager for \"global citizenship\"--a vision championed by UN agencies and international organizations. The conflation and disruption of biological citizenship, nationally and globally, together influenced the identity negotiation of Taiwanese medical epidemiologists.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"433-445"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144733912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-05-05DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2653857
Frederike Fahse, Henriette Langstrup
{"title":"Response-Able Care and Undone Care Spaces: The Role of Digital Technologies in Danish Epilepsy Care.","authors":"Frederike Fahse, Henriette Langstrup","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2653857","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2653857","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, we explore how people with epilepsy and their caregivers handle everyday life with epilepsy and the constant fear of an unexpected seizure through digital care technologies. These technologies are often used outside clinical settings and without clinicians' involvement or awareness. Their use is dependent on response-able care relations. We explore the precarities that arise when this dependency leads to the creation of \"undone care spaces\" - spaces outside the clinical realm, where the potential for care is effectively absent due to people with epilepsy's active rejection of digitally enabled but socially-obligating care.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"179-192"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147844394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-05-09DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2666903
Letizia Bonanno
{"title":"The State, the Household, the Voluntary Sector: The Pharmaceuticalization and Collectivization of Care in Athens' Social Clinics of Solidarity.","authors":"Letizia Bonanno","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2666903","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2666903","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Athens' social clinics of solidarity, I explore how the volunteers redefined pharmaceuticals as they moved from state-licensed pharmacies to households and into the grassroots voluntary sector. Therefore, I trace how their value, status and meaning shifted in the process: medicines were no longer seen as commodities but treated as sociable objects of care. In showing how state policies and market forces made pharmaceuticals increasingly central to social relations and care practices in times of austerity, I argue that pharmaceuticalization can develop alongside and even arise from grassroots, collective efforts to pool and redistribute medicines.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"317-330"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147857472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-06-01DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2679588
Giorgio Brocco
{"title":"Modalities of Enfleshment: Albinism and the Limits of Biosociality in Tanzania.","authors":"Giorgio Brocco","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2679588","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2679588","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Media and humanitarian discourses surrounding violence against people with albinism in Tanzania have fostered forms of biosocial relatedness and public recognition. Yet albinism does not consistently consolidate into a stable biosocial identity. Drawing on ethnographic research with Farida, Baraka and other interlocutors with albinism, this article ethnographically develops the concept of \"modalities of enfleshment\" to attend to how albinism is lived through shifting interpretations and embodied experiences. In this paper, I argue that the condition offers a case study for understanding how bodymind differences are continually revalued across and shaped by biomedical, disability, socio-cultural, economic, political, and institutional domains and practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"331-345"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148139318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-06-26DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2688801
Ayo Wahlberg
{"title":"Modes of Speculation.","authors":"Ayo Wahlberg","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2688801","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2688801","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This is the afterword to the Special Issue \"Interrogating Speculative Futures: The Politics of Imagining Futures with(out) Chronic Illness.\"</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"498-499"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148333628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-02-23DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2634618
Jiaqi Liu, Jianfeng Zhu, Mei Ding, Rubing Yang, Dong Dong
{"title":"Eggcentrism: On How Eggs Come to Matter in Chinese IVF.","authors":"Jiaqi Liu, Jianfeng Zhu, Mei Ding, Rubing Yang, Dong Dong","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2634618","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2634618","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We introduce <i>eggcentrism</i> to examine how eggs govern women's time, choices, and worth in Chinese IVF clinics. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how clinical and social infrastructures render the egg central to scrutiny and responsibility. Through clinical observations and patient narratives, we critique how reproductive care practices make the egg visible, actionable, and culturally charged. While women's bodies are intensively managed, male infertility remains peripheral. We argue that <i>eggcentrism</i> reveals how temporal pressure, clinical practices, and technoscientific governance shape reproductive outcomes and the cultural terrain women navigate, reinforcing gendered burdens in reproductive medicine.Media teaser: Eggs are positioned at the center of fertility care in China, shaping how women's time, responsibility, and value are judged in IVF clinics.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"109-123"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147272536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-05-13DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2671804
Roger Goodman, Naoki Ikegami
{"title":"Toward an Understanding of the Healthcare System in Japan: A Co-Constructed Account.","authors":"Roger Goodman, Naoki Ikegami","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2671804","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2671804","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Through an experimental approach, that incorporates a Japanese form of academic dialogue known as <i>taidan</i>, this article sets out to capture how an experienced British anthropologist of Japan draws on their own experiences as a patient to learn from a Japanese \"key informant,\" what they believe constitute the key elements for understanding the healthcare system in Japan. This approach is intended to make more transparent the process through which anthropologists produce their accounts by highlighting the \"voice of the informant\" alongside that of the anthropologist.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"421-432"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147934620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Medical AnthropologyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-04-13DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2026.2656925
Timothy Olanrewaju Alabi
{"title":"Treatment Multiplicity in a Nigerian Psychiatric Hospital.","authors":"Timothy Olanrewaju Alabi","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2656925","DOIUrl":"10.1080/01459740.2026.2656925","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, I investigate the multiplicity of mental healthcare practices at Aro Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Abeokuta, Nigeria, using Annemarie Mol's theory of multiple bodies to explore how biomedical, sociocultural, and spiritual dimensions intersect in treatment. Drawing on nine months of hospital ethnography, I illustrate how care practices integrate global biomedical standards with local cultural beliefs about personhood and recovery. Formal interventions-psychotropic medication and occupational therapy-are complemented by spiritual counseling and moral rehabilitation, reflecting Yoruba ontology. These practices adapt global holistic frameworks to resource-constrained settings. This article advocates for culturally resonant recovery models, contributing to global mental health discourse.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"208-226"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147677726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}