Anthropologists engaging with biopolitical theory have commonly assumed that biomedicine is a tool for enacting state-based policies to manage population health. Recent insights in medical anthropology have troubled this assumption, calling into question the role of physicians as “handmaidens” of state-based health policy. I use my position as a physician-anthropologist...
Victorian novels’ characteristic preoccupation with marriage and inheritance has led scholars to view the form as socially conservative in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet contemporary commentators feared what young women might conceive as a result of reading. The key to this dilemma, I argue, is the usual consequence of nineteenth-century marriage...