Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model focusing on broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr. T. Adeoye Lambo, the first indigenous Nigerian to earn a specialty degree in psychiatry in the United Kingdom in 1954. Lambo returned to Nigeria to become the medical superintendent of the newly founded Aro Mental Hospital in Abeokuta, Nigeria’s first “modern” mental hospital. At Aro, Lambo began to revolutionize psychiatric research and clinical practice in Nigeria, working to integrate “modern” western medical theory and technologies with “traditional” cultural understandings of mental illness. Lambo’s research focused on deracializing psychiatric thinking and redefining mental illness in terms of a model of universal human similarities that crossed racial and cultural divides.

Black Skin, White Coats is the first work to focus primarily on black Africans as producers of psychiatric knowledge and as definers of mental illness in their own right. By examining the ways that Nigerian psychiatrists worked to integrate their psychiatric training with their indigenous backgrounds and cultural and civic nationalisms, Black Skin, White Coats provides a foil to Frantz Fanon’s widely publicized reactionary articulations of the relationship between colonialism and psychiatry. Black Skin, White Coats is also on the cutting edge of histories of psychiatry that are increasingly drawing connections between local and national developments in late-colonial and postcolonial settings and international scientific networks. Heaton argues that Nigerian psychiatrists were intimately aware of the need to engage in international discourses as part and parcel of the transformation of psychiatry at home.

Each day Burt Wheeler is plagued by the same question. When did it happen? If he could pinpoint the beginning, then he might begin to make peace with himself. He vividly remembers when the doctor diagnosed Kee, his loving wife of over fifty years, with "Alzheimer-type dementia." But, as hard as he tries, it's impossible for him to determine when his wife's dementia started. He remembers her bout with depression, but that, he thinks, was surely due to her breast cancer. There was their dream vacation to Greece when Kee seemed so tired and indifferent. There were the unopened books, when reading had always been such a source of pleasure to her. And, he recalls, the gradual personality changes with friends, and even with family.

Wheeler started writing this book as a form of self-therapy when he found himself thrust into the role of caretaker to his wife--a role for which he felt unprepared. He wrote in memory of the very special woman his wife had been—a wonderful mother, charming and gracious, as well as a deeply respected psychotherapist. She was also his best friend, and he loved her. So, to some degree, this is a love story—a story about two people who have shared life's ups and downs for over fifty years. It's also about commitment.

In Close to Me, but Far Away, Wheeler provides insight into what a caregiver's day is like, as he shares his most intimate thoughts with us. The book provides a window into the author's personal life as he seeks to confront his own ineptitude and the occasional despair he feels as he deals daily with Alzheimer's. He also touches on the question of what keeps him going through times of exhaustion and frustration. Part of his answer lies in holding tenaciously to memories, and part lies in what he believes is a human's extraordinary capacity to continue plodding along simply because he must. Wheeler also believes in rejoicing in the beauty that can be experienced, and he believes in humor, humor achieved only by distancing ourselves from the events that so deeply engage us. And, of course, there is also the indefinable nature of love.

Alzheimer's is a terrifying and horrible disease, as much for loved ones as for the patient. Those who are caregivers or friends of Alzheimer's patients or caregivers will empathize with Burton Wheeler's story. And some might receive comfort from his words or learn from him. Because Alzheimer's is a disease that could affect anyone, Close to Me, but Far Away is a story that should be read by all.

How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve 

Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital. 

In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics. 

Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global “MSM” category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed. 

Since the 1980s, increasing numbers of hospitals in the United States have formed internal ethics committees to help doctors and other health care professionals deal with complicated ethical questions, especially those regarding the end of a life. But it is only in recent years that German hospitals have followed suit. In Conflicts of Care, Helen Kohlen offers the first comprehensive look at the origin and function of these committees in German hospitals. Using a mix of archival research, participant observation, and interviews, Kohlen explores the debates that surrounded their formation and the functions they have taken on since their creation.

Choy conducted extensive interviews with Filipino nurses in New York City and spoke with leading Filipino nurses across the United States. She combines their perspectives with various others—including those of Philippine and American government and health officials—to demonstrate how the desire of Filipino nurses to migrate abroad cannot be reduced to economic logic, but must instead be understood as a fundamentally transnational process. She argues that the origins of Filipino nurse migrations do not lie in the Philippines' independence in 1946 or the relaxation of U.S. immigration rules in 1965, but rather in the creation of an Americanized hospital training system during the period of early-twentieth-century colonial rule. Choy challenges celebratory narratives regarding professional migrants’ mobility by analyzing the scapegoating of Filipino nurses during difficult political times, the absence of professional solidarity between Filipino and American nurses, and the exploitation of foreign-trained nurses through temporary work visas. She shows how the culture of American imperialism persists today, continuing to shape the reception of Filipino nurses in the United States.

In The Ethics of Care, Fiona Robinson demonstrates how the responsibilities of sustaining life are central to the struggle for basic human security. She takes a unique approach, using a feminist lens to challenge gender biases in rights-based, individualist approaches.Robinson's thorough and impassioned consideration of care in both ethical and practical terms provides a starting point for understanding and addressing the material, emotional and psychological conditions that create insecurity for people. The Ethics of Careexamines “care ethics” and “security” at the theoretical level and explores the practical implications of care relations for security in a variety of contexts: women's labor in the global economy, humanitarian intervention and peace building, healthcare, and childcare.

Theoretically-innovative and policy-relevant, this critical analysis demonstrates the need to understand the obstacles and inequalities that obstruct the equitable and adequate delivery of care around the world.

A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy 

The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy, Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood.

By holding up the threat of food allergens to the white nuclear family to galvanize political and scientific action, Glabau shows, the movement excludes many, including Black women and disabled adults, whose families and health have too often been marginalized from public health and social safety net programs. Further, its strategies are founded on the assumption that market-based solutions will address issues of social exclusion and equal access to healthcare. 

Sharing the personal experiences of a wide spectrum of people, including parents, support group leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists, Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism. Using critical, intersectional feminism to interrogate how race, class, and gender shape activist priorities and platforms, it shows the way to new, justice-focused models of advocacy.

In this seminal collection of articles on health care in the Third World, sociological perspectives are applied to medical issues in revealing ways. Fourteen essays (all but two of which are original to this volume) examine the social production of health, disease, and systems of care throughout the developing world. The volume covers a range of areas—central Africa, Nigeria, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Nepal, China, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Mexico—and a broad scope of topics, from emergency care, the AIDS epidemic, and women's health care, to public health programs and national health care policies.

Contributors address the central question of whether health systems in developing areas should emphasize the role of clinical medicine and individual physicians or community and preventive medical resources. The major health problems faced by these societies—inadequate sanitation, infectious disease, high infant-child mortality, and a lack of family planning—indicate the greater need for health educators and public health workers despite many poor nations' desire for Western doctors. Other topics that are examined include the process of seeking medical aid; the relationship between traditional and modern medicines; medical education, hospital care, and communication between doctors and patients in developing countries; and the relevance and application of sociology in Third World settings.

This volume seeks to draw attention to the significance of medical sociology for understanding Third World health problems and to show how examining developing societies may necessitate reframing or modifying some Western sociological notions. In addition, these essays stretch the boundaries of medical sociology to include Third World issues.

The editors argue that ideas about humanity find concrete expression in the governing work that operationalizes those ideas to produce order, prosperity, and security. As a site of governance, humanity appears as both an object of care and a source of anxiety. Assertions that humanity is being threatened, whether by environmental catastrophe or political upheaval, provide a justification for the elaboration of new governing techniques. At the same time, humanity itself is identified as a threat (to nature, to nation, to global peace) which governance must contain. These apparently contradictory understandings of the relation of threat to the category of humanity coexist and remain in tension, helping to maintain the dynamic co-production of governance and humanity.

Contributors. Arun Agrawal, Joao Biehl , Didier Fassin, Allen Feldman, Ilana Feldman, Rebecca Hardin, S. Lochann Jain, Liisa Malkki, Adriana Petryna, Miriam Ticktin, Richard Ashby Wilson, Charles Zerner

“I decide that from now on we should listen to him. His lip may be deflated and his left side paralyzed, but he knows. And he has made terrible mistakes. But he knows. He knows. We are lucky that way.”

Lucky That Way, a nuanced, richly engaging memoir, chronicles the joys and tribulations of a daughter who rediscovers her father as he nears the end of his life. Ernie Gerhardt, an artist and teacher, is largely estranged from his five children, but when he suffers a debilitating stroke, his daughter Pamela must fly to Las Vegas to tend to him. When she arrives to find Ernie newly and shockingly fragile, she is hit by an unexpected wave of tenderness.

As she watches over him in intensive care, she recalls turning points in her family history—the early death of her mother and her father’s turn to heavy drinking--and reflects on the idiosyncrasies that make an imperfect and unique family, on what it means to become old, on what happens when parents are no longer the caregivers but the cared-for, and on how a family copes with their responsibility to the elderly.

Written in a crisp, engaging style, the story is less about the drudgery of finding the right mix of medicines, at-home caregivers, and rehabilitation centers and more about the emotional ramifications of caring for the sick under the weight of sometimes flawed attachments.

People make mistakes, grow old, get sick, and pass on from this world. Lucky That Way examines the irritations and comforts of contemporary family bonds. Gerhardt sifts through the complicated, multi-layered relationships for both wry comedy and high drama and records a string of triumphs and mishaps as Ernie and his five adult children struggle to manage his life and find meaning before their time runs out.

The emerging theme of imperfect humans struggling with life's great mysteries will strike a chord of recognition with the tens of thousands of Baby-Boomers and Gen-Xers who are currently facing similar circumstances with their elderly loved ones. Pamela Gerhardt’s heartfelt story about a family coming to terms with their aging father’s illness and imminent death takes readers on an emotional roller coaster that highlights love, loss, humor, and sadness.

A fascinating and unprecedented ethnography of animal sanctuaries in the United States
 

In the past three decades, animal rights advocates have established everything from elephant sanctuaries in Africa to shelters that rehabilitate animals used in medical testing, to homes for farmed animals, abandoned pets, and entertainment animals that have outlived their “usefulness.” Saving Animals is the first major ethnography to focus on the ethical issues animating the establishment of such places, where animals who have been mistreated or destined for slaughter are allowed to live out their lives simply being animals.   

Based on fieldwork at animal rescue facilities across the United States, Elan Abrell asks what “saving,” “caring for,” and “sanctuary” actually mean. He considers sanctuaries as laboratories where caregivers conceive and implement new models of caring for and relating to animals. He explores the ethical decision making around sanctuary efforts to unmake property-based human–animal relations by creating spaces in which humans interact with animals as autonomous subjects. Saving Animals illustrates how caregivers and animals respond by cocreating new human–animal ecologies adapted to the material and social conditions of the Anthropocene.

Bridging anthropology with animal studies and political philosophy, Saving Animals asks us to imagine less harmful modes of existence in a troubled world where both animals and humans seek sanctuary.