Using a narrative epistemology approach against the backdrop of popular culture and the history of science, Manderson shows how people remake their bodies, identities, and biographies after catastrophic bodily loss and change.

Lenore Manderson is an inaugural Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts, at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia. As a medical anthropologist, public health scholar and social historian of medicine, she has been active in education and research on inequality, social exclusion and marginality, infectious and chronic disease, gender and sexuality, in Australia, Southeast and East Asia, and Africa. She has published over 500 works, including the co-edited volumes Global Health Policy, Local Realities (2000), Social Capital and Social Justice (2009), and Chronic Conditions, Fluid States (2010). She collaborated in and is the subject of the film, Nerve (USA, 2007). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the World Academy of Art and Science, and is Editor of the international journal Medical Anthropology .

Preface; Prologue Perdita's Story; Chapter 1 The Body as Subject; Chapter 2 Our Cyborg Selves, and Other Modern Tales; Chapter 3 Visible Ruptures: The Art of Living with Lack; Chapter 4 Body Basics: Living with a Stoma; Chapter 5 The Feminine in Question; Chapter 6 Replaceable Parts: The End of Natural Life; Chapter 7 Conclusion: Necessity's Children;