An application of the theory of life's lesions to the study of the menopausal transition.

The aim of this article is to shed light on the experiential and contextual sources influencing menopausal manifestations, or discomforts. To do so, I propose the concept of life's lesions, suggesting that women's experiences of physiological changes occurring during the menopausal transition may be heightened by specific aspects of their lives embedded in society and culture. The concept of life's lesions advances the notion that the lived experience tends to order a person's life and shape a person's experience of his or her body, including during menopause.

Family, kinship, memory and temporality in the age of the new genetics.

The new genetics has now become an integral part of contemporary biomedicine, promising great advances in alleviating disease. Like any scientific endeavor, beliefs in the new genetics tend to give new meanings to people's lives and therefore have significant implications for people's lived experience. Drawing on fieldwork in the USA and research in various literatures, the aim of this article is to explore the role the new genetics plays in mainstream American society as revealed in people's narratives of their families' medical histories.

Biomedicine globalized and localized: western medical practices in an outpatient clinic of a Mexican hospital.

Following contemporary globalization, biomedicine and western style hospitals have penetrated most corners of the world. We must therefore ask, "How has the diffusion of biomedicine impacted biomedicine's core features of practice cross culturally? How do physicians in different countries make diagnoses, explain etiology and treat patients? To what degree does a physician's cultural understanding shape biomedicine?" Based on extensive fieldwork in a Mexican hospital (Physicians at work, patients in pain. Revised with new preface, Carolina Academic Press, Durham, 2001), this study analyzes the ways in which biomedicine becomes culturally reinterpreted as it moves from one cultural venue to another, and explores the theoretical and practical consequences of this reinterpretation.

Hospital ethnography: introduction.

The introduction sets out two central ideas around which this collection of articles on hospital ethnography has been organised. The first is that hospitals are not identical clones of a global biomedical model. Hospitals take on different forms in different cultures and societies.

The new genetics and its consequences for family, kinship, medicine and medical genetics.

In the past several decades there has been an explosion in our understanding of genetics. The new genetics is an integral part of contemporary biomedicine and promises great advances in alleviating disease, prolonging human life and leading us unto the medicine of the future. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which people make sense of the uncertainties that are associated with the new genetics, which by definition involve family and kinship relations.

Illusions of controlling the future: Risk and genetic inheritance.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the implications of current beliefs that human beings can control the risk of inheriting a genetic disease and influence their present and future health. To accomplish this goal, materials will be drawn from disparate literatures bearing on concepts of probability, risk and genetic inheritance, and on empirical data gathered on cancer survivors and healthy persons with a family history of cancer. The concept of risk has been theorised on a grand scale but, as Lupton (1999, Introduction, Risk and Sociological Theory , Cambridge University Press) correctly observes, there has been very little empirical work done on how people experience risk as part of their lived world.