Margaret Lock & Vinh-Kim Nguyen 
An Anthropology of Biomedicine [PDF ebook] 

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new
introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing
on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies
bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural
anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and
medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the
thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive
product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down.

* Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective,
exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history,
environment, culture, and politics

* Develops and integrates an original theory: that the human body
in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable,
malleable entity

* Makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographic
materials around the globe to illustrate the importance
of this methodological approach

* Integrates key new research data with more classical material,
covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth,
by military doctors from colonial times on

* Uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as the
global commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern forms
of population, and the extension of biomedical technologies into
domestic and intimate domains

* Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and
Anthropology

Circa l’autore

Margaret Lock is the Marjorie Bronfman Professor Emerita in
the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of
Anthropology at Mc Gill University. Among her numerous awards are
the Gold Medal for Research by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and the Wellcome Medal of Britain’s
Royal Anthropological Society. In 2005 she was awarded both a
Killam Prize and Trudeau Foundation Fellowship. She is the author
and/or co-editor of 14 books and has published more than 190
articles.

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is a physician and a medical
anthropologist. He practices medicine in Montréal at the
Clinique l’Actuel, which specializes in HIV and hepatitis,
and the Emergency Department of the Jewish General Hospital, and
teaches at the University of Montreal where he is an Associate
Professor in Social Medicine. As a researcher, he is
affiliated with both Global Health Unit of the Montreal University
Hospitals’ Research Centre and the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He was recently awarded the Aurora
prize for his research by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.