Margaret Lock is the Marjorie Bronfman Professor Emerita inthe Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department ofAnthropology at McGill University. Among her numerous awards arethe Gold Medal for Research by the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada and the Wellcome Medal of Britain'sRoyal Anthropological Society. In 2005 she was awarded both aKillam Prize and Trudeau Foundation Fellowship. She is the authorand/or co-editor of 14 books and has published more than 190articles.
Vinh-Kim Nguyen is a physician and a medicalanthropologist. He practices medicine in Montréal at theClinique l'Actuel, which specializes in HIV and hepatitis,and the Emergency Department of the Jewish General Hospital, andteaches at the University of Montreal where he is an AssociateProfessor in Social Medicine. As a researcher, he isaffiliated with both Global Health Unit of the Montreal UniversityHospitals' Research Centre and the Max Planck Institute for SocialAnthropology in Halle, Germany. He was recently awarded the Auroraprize for his research by the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada.

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting newintroduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusingon the ways in which the application of biomedical technologiesbring about radical changes to societies at large, culturalanthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician andmedical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate thethesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusiveproduct of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down.
* Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective,exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history,environment, culture, and politics
* Develops and integrates an original theory: that the human bodyin health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable,malleable entity
* Makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographicmaterials around the globe to illustrate the importanceof this methodological approach
* Integrates key new research data with more classical material,covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth,by military doctors from colonial times on
* Uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as theglobal commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern formsof population, and the extension of biomedical technologies intodomestic and intimate domains
* Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology andAnthropology