Article ID: CBB512308370

Malignant yet Benign: The Political Economy of a Skin Cancer Diagnosis in Colombia (2020)

unapi

This paper is about the ontology of a cancer diagnosis at high-end hospitals in Colombia. Drawing on a seventeen-month ethnographic fieldwork study in this country, it pays attention to how dermatologists, pathologists, and oncologists looked at my partner’s skin during a routine medical checkup and enacted two seemingly contradictory diagnoses: a lethal melanoma and a benign dysplastic nevus—commonly known as mole. Because their differences under the microscope or through dermatology goggles may be subtle, physicians often disagree on what they see. When medical services are not unrelated to the economic possibilities of patients to pay for them, what emerges through a microscope might be different. With neoliberal medical reforms in Colombia as background, this paper focuses on the ontological indeterminacy of cancer and its relationship to high-end hospitals and a patient who could, albeit not without effort, pay for the treatment. Thus, I argue that how physicians saw was not unrelated to what they saw and therefore to their practices of medicine in neoliberal Colombia. How do medical practices and ways of seeing in Colombia enter into composition with the bodies they study? Could the same skin tissue simultaneously be cancerous and noncancerous?

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Authors & Contributors
Livingston, Julie
Boomgaard, Peter
Clancey, Gregory K.
Duncan, Peter
Elman, Benjamin A.
Espinosa, Mariola
Journals
Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity
American Ethnologist
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Publishers
University of California
Duke University Press
Johns Hopkins University Press
Rutgers University Press
University of British Columbia Press
University of Chicago Press
Concepts
Medicine and politics
Medicine and economics
Public health
Medicine
Medicine and society
Colonialism
People
Levi, Giuseppe
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
18th century
20th century, early
Places
United States
Cuba
Great Britain
Caribbean
Philippines
Senegal
Institutions
Rockefeller Foundation
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