Cultural Studies of Biomedicine Research - The Department of ...

Cultural Studies of Biomedicine Research
A Sampling of Publications
Anne Becker
Special Issue Editor: New Global Perspectives on Eating Disorders, editorial, and “Television,
Disordered Eating, and Young Women in Fiji” in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, v.28, 4,
2004.
[From the editorial (excerpts)]: Why devote a special issue of CMP to new global perspectives
on eating disorders? First, the public health impact on eating disorders is substantial. These
illnesses – which include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder – affect
over five million Americans (NIMH 1994) and are associated with serious medical and
psychiatric co-morbidity. In fact, the mortality rate associated with anorexia and bulimia nervosa
is one of the highest among all psychiatric illnesses. As a result, eating disorders can have a
devastating impact on affected children, adults and their families. Next, contrary to former
prevailing stereotypes that eating disorders selectively burden privileged girls and young women,
these illnesses affect men and women of diverse ages and social backgrounds. Risk may be as
high or higher among ethnic minority and socially disadvantaged young women. Finally,
sociocultural factors believed to moderate risk are incompletely understood.
Anne Becker. Ethnicity and Differential Access to Care for Eating Disorder Symptoms.
International Journal of Eating Disorders, 2002.
Mary- Jo DelVecchio Good.
“The Biotechnical Embrace and the Medical Imaginary.” In Subjectivity: Ethnographic
Investigations. Eds. J. Biehl, B. Good. and A. Kleinman, University of California Press, 2007.
[Abstract]: Subjective experiences of clinical scientists who produce and deliver high
technology medicine and of patients who receive treatment via this technology are fundamental
to understanding the political economy and culture of hope that underlie bioscience and
biomedicine. In this essay I examine interpretive concepts linking bioscience and biotechnology
and their societal institutions to subjective experience. These concepts are the medical imaginary,
the biotechnical embrace, the political economy of hope, and the clinical narrative. Drawing on
my research and observations of the culture and political economy of biomedicine in the United
States and internationally, I illustrate from studies of clinical scientists, oncologists and their
patients, biotechnology venture capitalists, and public actions and discourses.
“The Biotechnical Embrace.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 4, 2001.
[Abstract]: This essay discusses three interpretive concepts that link bioscience and
biotechnology to society: the medical imaginary, the biotechnical embrace, and the clinical
narrative. Drawing on research carried out in the United States and internationally on the culture
and political economy of biomedicine, the essay examines these interpretive concepts through
examples from studies of patients, clinicians, scientists, and venture capitalists engaged in the
worlds of oncology and high-technology medicine. These interpretive concepts contribute to an
understanding of how the affective dimensions of the experience of patients, clinicians and
scientists invested in high-technology medicine are fundamental to bioscience and biomedicine,
and to the political economy and culture of hope.

American Medicine: The Quest for Competence. University of California Press, 1998, 1995.
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Siwi Ratna Padmawati, Amalia Muhaimin, Yati Soenart, Matthew
Lakoma, and Soenarto Sastrowijoto. “Medicine on the Edge of Life: Comparative Perspectives
from Academic Medical Centers in Indonesia (Yogyakarta) and America (Boston); “Physicians’
Encounters with the End of Life. A Comparative Study of Indonesian and American Physicians;”
and “Physician Attitudes about Death and End of Life Care: A Comparison of Indonesian and
American Academic Physicians.” UGM Center for Bioethics publication, with the support of Dr.
Sardjito Teaching Hospital. UGM. Yogyakarta, 2008. (Also in press for international
publications).
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Cara James, Byron Good, and Anne Becker, “The Culture of
Medicine and Racial, Ethnic, and Class Disparities in Health Care,” in Unequal Treatment:
Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, ed. Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y.
Stith, and Alan R. Nelson. Washington, D.C.: IOM, The National Academies Press, pp. 594-625
(2003); Reprinted in revision as “The Culture of Medicine and Inequalities in Medical Care by
Race, Ethnicity and Social Class” in Social Inequalities, eds. Mary Romero and Edward
Margolis, The Blackwell Series in Sociology. 2005.
Guido Giarelli, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Byron J. Good.eds. Clinical Hermeneutics
(Bologna Italy), 2005.
Patricia Ruopp, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Matthew Lakoma, Nina M. Gadmer, Robert M.
Arnold, and Susan D. Block, “Questioning Care at the End of the Life: Physicians’ Reflections
on Errors and Mistakes,” Journal of Palliative Care 8: 2005.
[Abstract (excerpts)]: Physicians question care more frequently in most emotionally powerful
deaths than recent deaths. Physicians question communication with patients and families and
within medical teams, medical judgment and technique, standards of practice, and high-risk
treatments, often assigning responsibility for medical management they perceive as inappropriate,
futile, overly aggressive, or mistakes in judgment and technique. Responsibility ranges from the
culture of medicine to the personal. Frustration, guilt and anger are more frequently expressed in
narratives when care is questioned.
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Nina M. Gadmer, Patricia Ruopp, Matthew Lakoma, Amy M.
Sullivan, Ellen Redinbaugh, Robert M. Arnold, and Susan D. Block , “Narrative Nuances on
Good and Bad Deaths: Internists’ Tales from High-Technology Work Places,” Social Science
and Medicine 58: 2004.
[Abstract (excerpts)]: “Good death” and “bad death” are common in popular discourse on death
and dying. However, these terms are rarely used by physicians in this study. Physicians’
narratives are nuanced with professional judgments about what constitutes quality end-of-life
care. Three major themes emerge from these narratives and frame the positive and negative
characteristics of paitne death. Time and Process, Medical Care and Treatment Decisions, and
Communication and Negotiation. When these physicians’ narratives about patient deaths are
compared with the classic sociological observations made by Glaser and Stauss in A Time for

Dying (1968), historical continuities are evident as are striking differences associated with rapid
innovation in medical technologies and a new language of medical futility.
Doris Chang, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Byron Good. eds. The Politics of Science: Culture,
Race, Ethnicity, and the Supplement to the Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health. Culture,
Medicine and Psychiatry 27:4 2003.
[Abstract: (Editorial Excerpts)]: The essays in this collection address the back story of the
making of the Supplement to the Surgeon General’s Report on Culture, Race and Ethnicity in
Mental Health Care. The Surgeon General’s Report places mental health care at the center of the
discussions of health care disparities. Such documents add momentum to recent scientific and
policy movements to investigate and redress the fundamental sources of disparities and
inequalities in medical treatment and mental health care. The essays (in this issue) suggest that
disciplinary perspectives exert a powerful influence on the evaluation and presentation of
scientific evidence concerning culture in policy research. Should culture be conceived as
independent variables or as categories appropriated and contested by individuals and groups?
How can various forms of research contribute to investigating differences in prevalence of
mental illness and disparities in access to good quality mental health services by race and
ethnicity? Debate over these issues continues in these essays. There is little wonder that
methodological and theoretical issues became the course of contention in writing the Supplement.
These essays attest not only to the challenges faced in constructing this document, but to the
enormous achievement of the Surgeon General and a large group of dedicated scientists and
federal staff.
Michael M.J. Fischer. “Ethnographic Critique and Technoscientific Narratives: The Old Mole,
Ethical Plateaux, and the Governance of Emergent Biosocial Polities.” Culture, Medicine and
Psychiatry 4; 2001.
[Abstract]: A reading of the puzzle novel, Vienna Blood, by Adrian Mathews is juxtaposed to
three ethnographic sketches of contemporary ethical plateaus or domains of ethical challenge --
the challenges of informed public consent to new technologies, the seductions to do whatever is
medically possible (sometimes at the expense of quality of life or the 'good death'), and the
power of money in driving the biotechnological industries. Vienna Blood deals with
precautionary germplasm modification and chemical camouflage justified as protection against
ethnically-targeted biological warfare, and touches on a series of technologies such as new
reproductive technologies, genetic engineering, and cryptographic attacks and defenses, as well
as the ability to evade regulatory controls. Such technoscientifically informed novels are useful
as cautionary tales, in exploring the complexity and interaction among new technologies, and the
phantasmagoria that help drive new technologies. They are not so good at thinking through
institutional development: a challenge for ethnography and new social theory. Ethnography, like
novels, can function as checks on the mechanisms of abstraction and universalization that
frequently bedevil the non-anthropological, non-cross-culturally or cross-temporally comparative,
social sciences. Questions are raised about new or emergent biosocialities, forms of governance,
and forms of cultural critique.
Giuseppe Raviola, M'Imunya Machoki, Esther Mwaikambo and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good.
“HIV, Disease Plague, Demoralization and ‘Burnout’: Resident Experience of the Medical
Profession in Nairobi, Kenya.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, March 2002.

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good with Esther Mwaikambo, Erastus Amayo, and James M'Imunya
Machoki. “Clinical Realities and Moral Dilemmas: Contrasting Perspectives from Academic
Medicine in Kenya, Tanzania, and America.” Daedalus 128(4):167-196; 1999.
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and Byron J. Good. “Clinical Narratives and the Study of
Contemporary Doctor-Patient Relationships.” In Gary L. Albrecht, Ray Fitzpatrick and Susan C.
Scrimshaw, eds., The Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine. London: Sage
Publications Ltd., 2000.
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and Byron J. Good. “‘Parallel Sisters’: Medical Anthropology and
Medical Sociology.” In Chloe Bird, Peter Conrad, and Allen Fremont, eds., The Handbook of
Medical Sociology, pp. 377-388. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000.
Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good. “'Fiction' and 'Historicity' in Doctors' Stories:
Social and Narrative Dimensions of Learning Medicine.” In Cheryl Mattingly and Linda Garro,
eds., Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.