Routledge Studies in Health and Medical Anthropology
Epidemiological Obfuscation: Historical and Contemporary Case Studies
1st Edition
Edited
By Freya L. Jephcott, Hillary A. Ash, Coreen McGuire
December 08, 2025
Epidemiology ostensibly exists to reveal and ascribe features to burdens of disease at a population level. However, as the designated arbiter of visibility in public health, it is well-positioned to also obscure burdens of disease with significant implications for both social justice and disease ...
Constructing the Pandemic in Pakistan: Competing Perceptions, Politics, and Structured Disparities during COVID-19
1st Edition
By Inayat Ali
September 30, 2025
With a focus on the way the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in Pakistan, this book casts a critical light on the unique experiences and responses of individuals, community and government. It critically examines how these diverse actors made sense of and navigated the outbreak of disease. The author ...
Living with Diabetes and Uncertainty in Cairo: Sweetness Under Pressure
1st Edition
By Mille Kjærgaard Thorsen
February 28, 2025
Living with Diabetes and Uncertainty in Cairo offers an ethnographic exploration of the interactions of two different understandings of type-2 diabetes: one related to the notion of ḍaghṭ, translated as “pressure” or “stress,” and another related primarily to obesity. The book is set in Egypt but ...
Discretionary Medicine in Pakistan: Poverty, Coloniality and Health
1st Edition
By Sanaullah Khan
November 25, 2024
This book uses the notion of “discretionary medicine” to explore the landscape of contemporary healthcare in Pakistan. It considers how patients frequently experience health interventions as out of touch with the suffering of everyday life and how healthcare provisions are viewed as intrusive, ...
Breathlessness and Biosociality: An Ethnographic Perspective on Living with Lung Disease in Later Life
1st Edition
By Fredrik Nyman
October 07, 2024
This book delves into the intricate landscape of respiratory diseases among older people, shedding light on their biosocial encounters while grappling with chronic breathlessness. While respiratory ailments predominantly afflict older people, often stemming from lifestyle choices like smoking, ...
Contesting Measles and Vaccination in Pakistan: Cultural Beliefs, Structured Vulnerabilities, Mistrust, and Geo-Politics
1st Edition
By Inayat Ali
September 05, 2024
This book explores issues surrounding measles and vaccination in Pakistan. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it focuses on two major outbreaks in Sindh Province and on Pakistan’s vaccination campaigns. The chapters examine the responses to outbreaks and vaccination from various ...
COVID-19 Syndemics and the Global South: A World Divided
1st Edition
Edited
By Inayat Ali, Merrill Singer, Nicola Bulled
July 31, 2024
This book focuses on syndemics in the Global South and uses COVID‑19 as a window to understand clusters of disparities and disease comorbidities. The pandemic has exposed and multiplied structural inequalities and certain subpopulations were more exposed to COVID‑19 as well as experienced greater ...
Negotiating the Pandemic: Cultural, National, and Individual Constructions of COVID-19
1st Edition
Edited
By Inayat Ali, Robbie Davis-Floyd
September 25, 2023
This book centers on negotiations around cultural, governmental, and individual constructions of COVID-19. It considers how the coronavirus pandemic has been negotiated in different cultures and countries, with the final part of the volume focusing on South Asia and Pakistan in particular. The ...
Childlessness in Bangladesh: Intersectionality, Suffering and Resilience
1st Edition
By Papreen Nahar
May 31, 2023
This book examines the intersectionality and stratified lived experience of rural poor and urban middle-class childless women in Bangladesh. Childless women in Bangladesh, an over-populated country where fertility control is the primary focus of health policy, are all but non-existent. Papreen ...
Treating Heroin Addiction in Norway: The Pharmaceutical Other
1st Edition
By Aleksandra Bartoszko
May 31, 2023
Focusing on the world of Norwegian Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) in the aftermath of significant reforms, this book casts a critical light on the intersections between medicine and law, and the ideologies infusing the notions of "individual choice" and "patient involvement" in the field of ...
amaXhosa Circumcision: Stories of Manhood and Mental Health
1st Edition
By Lauraine M. H. Vivian
January 09, 2023
This book investigates amaXhosa circumcision and the psychological processes involved. Lauraine Vivian employs concepts such as resilience, orthodoxy, broken men, and reciprocity to examine the experiences of men who have developed mental health issues in relation to their initiation into manhood. ...
Actively Dying: The Creation of Muslim Identities through End-of-Life Care in the United States
1st Edition
By Cortney Hughes Rinker
August 01, 2022
This book explores the experiences of Muslims in the United States as they interact with the health care system during serious illness and end-of-life care. It shifts "actively dying" from a medical phrase used to describe patients who are expected to pass away soon or who exhibit signs of ...