Customer Reviews

Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques, and Bodies (Body, Commodity, Text)

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I read the book because I am currently working on my MA thesis on new reproductive technologies (in the Czech republic). It really was a fascinating reading! This interdisciplinary collection of essays shows how (Western) medicine treats human bodies, works with laboratory tests or medical protocols. Authors (for example M. Berg, V. Singleton, M. J. Casper, Ch. Cussins, S. Hirschauer, S. Timmermans...), who are being classified among the representatives of the so called „second wave of science studies", turned their attention to „purely medical" or „just technical tasks" which have been until a few year ago regarded as unproblematical, and not pertaining to the field of social sciences. All essays are extremely well written and I think that their strength lie in the combination of detailed ethnographic accounts of life in laboratories and/or clinics and careful interpretative work. The topics of essays are of wide range - from medical protocols, creation of nursing intervention system or treatment of asthma to changes of sexes, re/construction of identity in infertility clinic or booming field of fetal surgery etc. - and studying any of them can be a great adventure. Medical work is characterized by the ongoing articulation of heterogenous elements - humans as well as nonhumans - and it is this making of science, making of medicine, that the authors focus on. The myth of one stable and coherent medicine, one patient-body, or one science has crumbled and fallen, for there are differences in this apparent unity - there is stability and instability, continuity and discontinuity, local and universal, humanity, identity and alienation or objetification. I think that no reader will be disappointed.