The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781978829596)

The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women's responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention - and especially the HPV vaccination - provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.


Author: Cristina A. Pop
ISBN-10: 1978829590
ISBN-13: 9781978829596
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/13/2022
Pages: 228
Format: Hardcover