Medical Anthropology

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

Viruses are the world's most abundant life form, and now, when humanity is in the midst of a close encounter with their immense power, perhaps the most feared. But do we understand viruses? Possibly the most enigmatic of living things, they are sometimes not considered a life form at all...

Head down the rabbit hole and feed your fascination for conspiracy and controversy. Conspiracy theories-they're influential and spread to sometimes irrational extremes. Why do people cling to conspiracy theories so powerfully? Is there a way to separate the possible from the impossible? Yes...

Written by a leading dermatologist, The Blue Man and Other Stories of the Skin provides a compelling and accessible introduction to the life of our largest organ, while also recounting the author’s experiences with memorable patients he has treated who suffer from mysterious skin conditions. Robert Norman begins by highlighting the qualities of the skin, tracing the history of its conditions and diseases, then examining the cultural, social and psychological impact of both color and irregularity.