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Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, our special issue reanimates iatrogenesis as a vital concept for the social sciences of medicine. It calls for medicine to expand its engagement of the injustices that unfold from clinical processes, practices, and protocols into patient lifeworlds and subjectivities beyond the clinic. The capacious view of iatrogenesis revealed by this special issue collection affords fuller and more heterogeneous insights on iatrogenesis that does not limit it to medical explanations alone, nor locate harm in singular points in time. These papers attend to iatrogenesis' immediate and lingering presences in socialities and structures within and beyond medicine, and the ways it reflects or reproduces the racism, sexism, and ableism built into medical logics.

In this article, we trace encounters between humans and phantasmic entities in hospitals in Indian-occupied and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In Pakistan, the presence of spectral beings (jinni) in hospitals is linked to state and sectarian violence, which precipitates ruptures between jinni and human worlds. Such breaches permit jinni to manifest in the medical present, where insecure actors harness them to ventriloquize unspoken anxieties. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, jinn-like, chronically mentally ill patients haunt psychiatric modernization projects. In embracing a jinneaological approach to medical crises, we theorize hospitals as multi-temporal and multi-dimensional spaces called "tesseracts," in which human-nonhuman encounters serve existential and political purposes.

"The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction" is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the field of anthropology and reproduction. Edited by Cecília Tomori and Sally Han, the handbook brings together experts in sociocultural and biological anthropology to explore various aspects of reproduction, including conception, pregnancy, birth, and menopause. The collection also examines the social and structural contexts in which reproduction takes place, addressing issues such as reproductive health, medicine, and technologies, as well as the impact of factors like race, gender, and inequality. The handbook is a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field, offering insights and solutions to the challenges and risks associated with reproduction. [Extracted from the article]

In Gilgit, capital of the Gilgit-Baltistan region in northern Pakistan, leucorrhea – vaginal discharge known in the vernacular as safaid pani, or 'white water' - serves as both a medical diagnosis and signifier of the chronicity of the reproductive, social, and emotional burdens endured by women. While ethnomedical providers explained safaid pani as resulting from relatively benign forms of 'weakness', which required minimal dietary or ethno-botanical recourse, allopathic physicians approached discharge as evidence of numerous pathologies that necessitated protracted and sometimes also expensive treatments. Physicians' clinical assessments were not solely biomedical, but also integrated informal folk and formal ethnomedical theories of causation. Clinical diagnoses that affirmed leucorrhea as a pathophysiology substantiated women's belief that it was proof of the destructive effects of sustained social inequity, peril, and distress on the body, and the uterus in particular. Women and their treating providers recognized the power of the (dys)functional uterus to not only threaten women's reproductive wellness but also their social, marital, and familial status, which hinged on their ability to become pregnant and give birth, to sons especially. Because of the ailing uterus's expansive importance, weeping wombs served as a potent source for women's claims making and calls for attention and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johnson, Jennifer. The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Jennifer Johnson's The Battle for Algeria provides a painstakingly researched and richly descriptive [...]

Global health metrics come into being in complex circumstances. Through ethnography that focuses closely on the forces driving uneven obstetric case reporting in a government hospital in northern Pakistan, this article challenges the integrity of the health care system documentation on which the state and non‐state interventions and evaluations rely. Incomplete and skipped case records not only resulted from the time constraints posed by work on a busy maternity ward. They also helped vulnerable frontline providers disguise and avoid accountability for the aftermaths of the medical mismanagement and maltreatment made more likely by infrastructural scarcity and disarray. Yet the provider‐side protections these tactics afforded came at patients' expense because they rendered error, wrongdoing, and iatrogenesis as invisible and unactionable. The sum of these reporting practices was "hospital paperworlds": defensively authored and aspirational datasets that conveyed desired rather than achieved outcomes, decontextualized risks and harms, and were too‐rarely triangulated for their correlational significances or deficiencies. [hospital ethnography, obstetrics, case reporting, metrics, Pakistan] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the efforts of local governments to reduce re-offending, lessen the fear of crime in neighborhoods and create safer and stronger communities in Great Britain. It mentions that the mandatory reducing re-offending indicator in local area agreements (LAA) is a sign that the role of local authorities in solving re-offending is being recognized. It notes that the Local Government Association (LGA) believes that local solutions can help solve the high rates of re-offending.