Special Issue of Medical Anthropology edited by Dr. Weaver

Some good news for Dr. Weaver. The special issue that she was editing for Medical Anthropology Quarterly (our sub-discipline’s flagship journal) was published during the holidays. The volume is titled, A Special Focus Section on Comorbidity, and it includes an introductory piece co-authored by Jo, Ron Barrett, and Mark Nichter; a single-authored piece by her titled, “Transactions in Suffering: Mothers, Daughters, and Chronic Disease Comorbidities in New Delhi, India“; and 5 additional articles that address how medical anthropologists conceptualize and work with comorbidities, or the overlap of more than one disease in a person’s life. As stated in the preface,
 
“The papers collected here address a wide variety of diseases and behaviors: chronic pain, diabetes, depression, interpersonal violence, tick-borne diseases, climate change, smoking, medication side effects, risk states. In so doing, they build from the long tradition in medical anthropology of pushing the boundaries of what “counts” as a disease in the first place. But they each go beyond this to address important questions related to comorbidity that have not been directly addressed in medical anthropology before: Does it matter which disease is diagnosed first, and if so, how? Do people experience their overlapping diseases and risk states as separate entities, or as a single force in their lives? Do they prioritize one over the other(s)? How does one disease predispose someone to another, both in a biological and a social sense? Where do health-demoting factors such as violence, insects that spread disease, climate change, medications, and other risk states come into play? What territory do our existing theoretical and methodological approaches cover, and not cover?”
 
The link below provides access to the table of contents and short lay summaries of each article included in the collection. The articles are available electronically through Springer.