How is the concept of patient care adapting in response to rapid changes in healthcare delivery and advances in medical technology? How are questions of ethical responsibility and social diversity shaping the definitions of healthcare?
In this topical study, scholars in anthropology, nursing theory, law and ethics explore questions involving the changing relationship between patient care and medical ethics. Contributors address issues that challenge the boundaries of patient care, such as:
- HIV-related care and research
- the impact of new reproductive technologies
- preventative healthcare
- technological breakthroughs that are changing personal-caring relationships.
Chapters range from a consideration of the practicalities of nursing and family healthcare to a debate about 'universal human needs' and patients' rights.
This book is a provocative exploration of the ways in which healthcare models are socially constructed. It will be of interest to policy-makers, medical practitioners and administrators, as well as students of sociology, anthropology and social policy.

Introduction: Why Do We Care Who Cares?; Part 1: Embodying Care: Giving Voice to Experience; 1: Love, Care and Diagnosis; 2: Triplets: Who Cares?; Part 2: Controlling Care: Rights and Responsibilities; 3: Taking Care? The Depo-Provera Debate; 4: Medical Care as Human Right: The Negation of Law, Citizenship and Power?; Part 3: Framing Care: Alternative Visions in Dialogue; 5: Caring for the Well: Perspectives on Disease Prevention; 6: Identifying Boundaries in Care: Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Men Who Have Sex with Men; Part 4: Nursing Care: Theory and Practice; 7: Ethics as Question; 8: Relative Strangers: Caring for Patients as the Expression of Nurses' Moral/Political Voice

Tamara Kohn Department of Anthropology,University of Durham Rosemary McKechnie Bath College of Higher Education