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This paper examines the grid of sentiment that structures medical travel to India. In contrast to studies that render emotion as ancillary, the paper argues that affect is fundamental to medical travel's ability to ease the linked somatic, emotional, financial, and political injuries of being ill 'back home'. The ethnographic approach follows the scenes of medical travel within the Indian corporate hospital room, based on observations and interviews among foreign patients, caregivers, and hospital staff in Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore. Foreign patients conveyed diverse sentiments about their journey to India ranging from betrayal to gratitude, and their expressions of risk, healthcare costs, and cultural difference help sustain India's popularity as a medical travel destination. However, although the affective dimensions of medical travel promise a remedy for foreign patients, they also reveal the fault lines of market medicine in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the social scientific work on psychiatry and mental health, from a variety of competing perspectives, has focused upon power and the social construction of 'mental illness'. Very little attention has been paid to resistance or to the various ways in which 'patients' or 'survivors' (as some now prefer to refer to themselves) have sought to socially deconstruct 'mental illness'. This paper seeks to redress that balance by way of a detailed examination of some of the key practices of resistance which have developed within the context of the UK mental health survivors movement. Using key concepts from Bourdieu's theory of practice, it examines the challenge which survivors have mounted to the symbolic power of psychiatry, and the resistance habitus which their opposition has given rise to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the medical course, which is the Master of Science in Medical Social Anthropology, offered at the University of Keele in Great Britain. The aim of the course is to explore the cultural performance of sickness and healing in a social structural framework with due reference to the provision of health care in diverse cultural and national settings.