New Books in Medicine

By: Marshall Poe
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of Medicine about their New Book Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
    New Books Network
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Science
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Episodes
  • Zhiying Ma, "Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2025)

    Zhiying Ma, "Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2025)
    Mar 14 2025
    In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family's rights and responsibilities. In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families' complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of what she calls "biopolitical paternalism"--a mode of governance that sees vulnerable individuals as sources of risk, frames risk management as the state's paternalistic intervention, and shifts responsibilities for care and management onto families. Ma outlines the ethical tensions, intimate vulnerabilities in households, and health disparities across the population that biopolitical paternalism produces. By exploring these implications, Ma demonstrates the myriad ways biopower enables, inhibits, and transforms medical care in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Mar 12 2025
    Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity. Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state. Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered. Nima Bassiri is assistant professor of literature at Duke University, where he is also the codirector of the Institute for Critical Theory. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)
    Mar 9 2025
    The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexican American activists. Uncovering nearly one hundred years of struggle, Lina-Maria Murillo reveals how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border fought to reclaim autonomy and care for themselves and their communities. Faced with a family planning movement steeped in eugenic ideology, working-class Mexican-origin women strategically demanded additional health services and then formed their own clinics to provide care on their own terms. Along the way, they developed what Murillo calls reproductive care— quotidian acts of community solidarity—as activists organized for better housing, education, wages, as well as access to birth control, abortion, and more. In Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2025), Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women's long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive freedom in Texas once again hangs in the balance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
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    1 hr and 11 mins

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