An Anthropology of Biomedicine

Abstract

Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen’s collaboration distils a scholarly anthropological account of global biomedicine from a pool of ethnographies, histories and social theories. The reader is offered narratives of the origins of biomedical science, the plurality of human biologies, the birth of population-focussed medicine, the experimental basis of biomedical claims, the ‘social life of organs’, the changing nature of reproduction and the explosion of genecentred discourse, to name but a few. In 520 pages, the authors achieve a thought-provoking synthesis of three centuries of thought, practice and conjecture.