Social Lives of Medicines
Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology Series

Medicines are the core of treatment in biomedicine, as in many other medical traditions. As material things, they have social as well as pharmacological lives, with people and between people. They are tokens of healing and hope, as well as valuable commodities. Each chapter of this book shows drugs in the hands of particular actors: mothers in Manila, villagers in Burkina Faso, women in the Netherlands, consumers in London, market traders in Cameroon, pharmacists in Mexico, injectionists in Uganda, doctors in Sri Lanka, industrialists in India, and policymakers in Geneva. Each example is used to explore a different problem in the study of medicines, such as social efficacy, experiences of control, skepticism and cultural politics, commodification of health, the attraction of technology and the marketing of images and values. The book shows how anthropologists deal with the sociality of medicines, through their ethnography, their theorizing, and their uses of knowledge.

Part I. Introduction: 1. An anthropology of materia medica; Part II. The Consumers: 2. Mothers and children: the efficacies of drugs; 3. Villagers and local remedies: the symbolic nature of medicines; 4. Women in distress: medicines for control; 5. Sceptical consumers: doubts about medicines; Part III. The Providers: 6. Drug vendors and their market: the commodification of health; 7. Pharmacists as doctors: bridging the sectors of health care; 8. Injectionists: the attraction of technology; 9. Prescribing physicians: medicines as communication; Part IV. The Strategists: 10. Manufacturers: scientific claims, commercial aims; 11. Health planners: making and contesting drug policy; Part V. Conclusion: 12. Anthropologists and the sociality of medicines.

Susan Reynolds Whyte is Professor at the Institute of Anthropology of the University of Copenhagen.
Sjaak van der Geest is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam.
Anita Hardon is Professor and Director of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam.