Medical Anthropology Quarterly最新文献

Recent research has unveiled the pervasiveness with which Indigenous patients are subjected to racialized stereotypes within the Canadian health system. Because discrimination in health care is associated with poor health outcomes and undertreated illness, there is a need to better understand how racism is perpetuated systemically in order to rectify the policies, practices, and attitudes that enable it. This article outlines a moral economy of care in emergency departments in western Canada by exploring the discourses that medical professionals employ when discussing cases of medical racism. While these discourses respond to the everyday realities of working in hospitals, they are also rooted in the colonial genealogy of health care in Canada and perpetuated by neoliberal shifts in health care services. By exploring the moral economy of care, this article sheds light on the way pervasive discourses contribute to reproducing and circulating Indigenous-specific racism and its role in decision-making.

Puerto Rico (PR) is facing an unprecedented healthcare crisis due to accelerating migration of physicians to the mainland United States (US), leaving residents with diminishing healthcare and excessively long provider wait times. While scholars and journalists have identified economic factors driving physician migration, our study analyzes the effects of spatial stigma within the broader context of coloniality as unexamined dimensions of physician loss. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews with physicians throughout PR and the US, we identified how stigmatizing meanings are attached to PR, its people, and its biomedical system, often incorporating colonial notions of the island's presumed backwardness, lagging medical technology, and lack of cutting-edge career opportunities. We conclude that in addition to economically motivated policies, efforts to curb physician migration should also address globally circulating ideas about PR, acknowledge their roots in coloniality, and valorize local responses to the crisis that are in danger of being lost to history.

After the legalization of abortion in 2018, Ireland needed clinicians to become abortion providers and make this political win a medical reality. Yet Irish doctors had next-to-no training in abortion care, and barriers ranging from stigma to economic pressures in the healthcare system impacted doctors’ desire to volunteer. How did hundreds of Irish doctors make the shift from family doctor to abortion provider? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2020, this article explores the process by which Irish general practitioners became abortion providers, attending to the material impact of medical technologies on that journey. Drawing from medical anthropologists who have examined similar themes of agency, pharmaceuticals, and medico-legal frameworks within the topic of assisted dying, I build on Anita Hannig's idea of “agentive displacement” to frame the productive impact of abortion pills on this transition.

What does it mean that hospitals in Haiti have become widespread sites of “kidnapping” for mothers and babies? In at least 46 countries, including Haiti, indebted patients are extralegally held prisoner in hospitals until family members, kin, outside groups, or charities pay their outstanding bills. The majority of those detained globally are women following complicated births. This article introduces and situates the global problem of “hospital detention” as it is practiced in Haiti, tying it to transnational architectures that target Black reproduction in global health. In this piece, Senisha and Mari share their experiences of detention, revealing the practice as continuous with other forms of coercion, neglect, and violence they face in seeking safe births, and highlighting the communal care, refusals, and acts of self-liberation that oppose these oppressions.