Biomedicine as Culture

Regula Valérie Burri is an affiliated research fellow at Collegium Helveticum, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and University of Zurich. Her doctoral thesis, "Doing Images: Zur Praxis medizinischer Bilder" (forthcoming), explores the social and cultural implications of medical imaging. She has been a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow and holds appointments with several Swiss universities. Her research interests focus on the relationship between science, technology, and society. She is the coauthor of "Social Studies of Scientific Images and Visualization," in Ed Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (with Joseph Dumit; MIT Press).

This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary biomedicine as a cultural practice. It brings together leading scholars from cultural anthropology, sociology, history, and science studies to conduct a critical dialogue on the culture(s) of biomedical practice, discussing its epistemic, material, and social implications. The essays look at the ways new biomedical knowledge is constructed within hospitals and academic settings and at how this knowledge changes perceptions, material arrangements, and social relations, not only within clinics and scientific communities, but especially once it is diffused into a broader cultural context.

Foreword. Introduction Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit I. Social and Cultural Studies of Biomedicine 1. Medicalizing Culture(s) or Culturalizing Medicine(s) Stefan Beck 2. Metaphors of Medicine and the Culture of Healing: Historical Perspectives Jakob Tanner 3. Medicine as Practice and Culture: The Analysis of Border Regimes and the Necessity of a Hermeneutics of Physical Bodies Gesa Lindemann II. Epistemic Practices and Material Culture(s) 4. The Future Is Now: Locating Biomarkers for Dementia Margaret Lock 5. Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies: The Example of Hypoglycaemia Annemarie Mol and John Law 6. Sociotechnical Anatomy Regula Valérie Burri 7. Risk and Safety in the Operating Theater: An Ethnographic Study of Socio-technical Practices Cornelius Schubert III. Biomedical Knowledge in Context 8. Genomic Susceptibility as an Emergent Form of Life? Genetic Testing, Identity, and the Remit of Medicine Nikolas Rose 9. Susceptible Individuals and Risky Rights: Dimensions of Genetic Responsibility Thomas Lemke 10. "Pop Genes": An Investigation of "the Gene" in Popular Parlance Barbara Duden and Silja Samerski 11. Genetics and Its Publics: Crafting Genetic Literacy and Identity in the Early Twenty-first Century Karen-Sue Taussig 12. Constructing the Digital Patient: Patient Organizations and the Development of Health Web Sites Nelly Oudshoorn. Epilogue: Indeterminate Lives, Demands, Relations: Emergent Bioscapes Joseph Dumit and Regula Valérie Burri