Search results
This collection examines the representation of medicine and medical practices in period drama on television. It explores the fascination that the genre has with the history of illness and the medical profession, which is apparent in the huge number of shows which have medicine as either their narrative focus or as important subplots. Chapter topics are interdisciplinary in nature and range from the professionalisation of medicine in Poldark to the representation of mental illness in Peaky Blinders. This volume reflects on the ways popular culture has constructed and considered the frailty of the human body, the progress – or otherwise – of science, the intersection of medicine, race, class, and gender, and the provision of public healthcare. These dramas do not only reveal much about how we view our corporeal past, however. All these issues are still pertinent today, and frequently they also function as a commentary on, and often a critique of, the issues surrounding medicine in the present day – in particular debates around public health provision, the politics of reproduction, genetic testing and research, and global pandemics.
Clinical trails 1 1 Clinical trails: researching cosmetic surgery tourism When we began the research project on which this book is based, we were all too aware of the criticisms of international medical travel (IMT) and of cosmetic surgery. In the mainstream media IMT is largely represented as personally and socially selfish and reckless, especially when it involves cosmetic procedures. The stereotype is one of patients travelling abroad for procedures on the cheap, carried out by unqualified ‘cowboy’ medics who make big profits based on the promise of
with her mother within days, all expenses paid by a Honduran charity, and underwent two surgeries within two weeks, the first palliative and the second corrective, otherwise known as a ‘complete repair’. In 2003, Yesenia returned to the United States for another surgery, this time to have a leaky pulmonary valve removed and replaced with a homograft, a valve from a human cadaver. Charities, churches and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have long transferred critically ill patients to rich countries for high-tech medical procedures that are locally unavailable
In this chapter, I discuss the history of various technologies for infection control in surgical operations. My account starts with the uptake of surgical gloves by practitioners in the late nineteenth century, which was a protracted process, and explains the relative disinterest of many surgeons in this particular technology by situating it in the context of other contemporary strategies of infection control. Exploring such alternative innovations shows that technological change in surgery and infection control does not happen in a vacuum. There are always
160 Beautyscapes: mapping cosmetic surgery tourism 8 Cosmetic convivialities and cosmopolitan beginnings In March 2012 we accompanied three women travelling as part of a package arranged for them by a cosmetic surgery tourism facilitator/agent to Tunisia for a variety of procedures. Lorna, who was 27 and from Scotland, worked on a North Sea oil rig and travelled for a breast augmentation and liposuction; 45-year-old Anita, the owner of an up-market hair salon in the south of England, was having a facelift; and Sally, aged 52, was having breast implants
possibilities for cut women to have their clitoris reconstructed. Developed by the French urologist Pierre Foldès in the 1990s, clitoral reconstruction (CR) is now available in an increasing number of European countries, including Sweden (Jordal and Griffin, 2017 ). The surgery promises a functionally and aesthetically restored clitoris for women with FGC, which thus implies an enhancement of sexual capacity (Foldès et al., 2012 ). Conceptualizing bioprecarity Utilizing the concept of bioprecarity, I investigate women’s experience of FGC and CR in the context of Sweden
declined as a growing number of laymen began to practise as physicians, often men who had studied at one of the great medical schools in Continental Europe. Lay people were well established as surgeons. The Church’s ban on priests in the higher orders carrying out surgery created a space in which the ‘doctor’ practising surgery was free of clerical competition. Gradually the predominance of the priest
, the son of a satin weaver. 4 He rose to become a highly respected surgeon whose reputation spread throughout Europe and beyond, today appearing frequently on everything from medical history blogs and the television quiz show QI to the insignia of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons. Tagliacozzi studied and then taught at the University of Bologna, where he introduced many of his students to his rhinoplasty method. The university held his plastic surgery work in such high esteem that they erected a statue to him in their anatomy theatre in 1640 – holding
being proposed. As a medical anthropologist I would be given the unique opportunity to carry out independent research centred on MSF’s Reconstructive Surgery Programme (RSP) for the victims of war in the Middle East. Working as an anthropologist in the humanitarian field, I would be joining a group of authors who have critically examined humanitarian practice, including those researching MSF. The
In an early episode of The Knick (2014–2015), Dr Algernon Edwards (André Holland), who has been forced to perform surgery in secret in the hospital basement after hours, records details of the process with photographs. Later, we see him, and eventually his colleagues, consult these images through a stereoscope. Edwards makes these photographs partly for patient case notes, and partly to track