Ethnologia Europaea

This special issue of Ethnologia Europaea explores new paths for our scientific disciplines within the expanding field of medical humanities. Medical humanities have seen a significant expansion in recent years, creating new research foci and leading to collaborations both within and outside of the humanities. As it is a growing academic field, we argue that it is necessary to be part of the medical humanities in defining and conceptualising new paths. The contributions to this special issue demonstrate the ways in which disciplines like European ethnology, folklore studies, social and cultural anthropology can contribute to the expansion, drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork from Croatia, Estonia, Slovenia and Sweden. This special issue opens a space for more collaboration within our fields, as well as with medicine. 

The article examines intercultural mediation which is a relatively new profession aimed at assuring equity in access to various institutions, including those in the field of healthcare. Based on qualitative research with intercultural mediators in Slovenia, the article analyses the power relations that arise in the triadic interactions in healthcare worker–patient–intercultural mediator relationships. We explore the role of intercultural mediators in relation to the two sides that they are supposed to connect: the side of the patients and the side of healthcare workers. Paying attention to power relations, we show how intercultural mediators’ shifting allegiances between patient and healthcare workers considerably shape their practice.

This article analyses how the metamorphosis of a state-funded healthcare system into a market-oriented system in Croatia since the 1990s has influenced the health-seeking behaviour of patients. Through in-depth interviews, patients were asked to identify their satisfaction with various health services and providers. Their answers reveal a complex narrative setup in which the possibility to select another healthcare therapy or provider was linked to their “willingness to pay”. The interview responses uncovered inequalities in the context of healthcare, as well as the politics and powers behind allocating and negotiating value in health-seeking. 

With the aim to illustrate the complex relations between complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and biomedicine, we examine how journalists have represented three influential Estonian CAM doctors. Our analysis of 36 journalistic texts published between 1996 and 2018 about these CAM doctors focuses on the similarities and the differences between the representations. Our study demonstrates how journalistic decisions shape the representations of CAM doctors, making journalists important actors in the debates between CAM and biomedicine. Due to the high polarisation between CAM and biomedicine in the Estonian media landscape, CAM doctors, as controversial figures, face constant pressure to make choices when participating in the public sphere. If CAM doctors choose a passive media strategy, it can lead to more polarised journalistic representations of CAM-related activities.

This article aims to deepen understandings of physician–patient encounters by investigating views and perceptions held by Swedish physicians and care seekers on medicine access. Through a relational approach and a focus on materialities of medicines as fluid and contingent, we conceptualize medicine access as situated everyday practices and physician–patient encounters as embedded in sociomaterial configurations. Through a bricolage approach, we present both quantitative and qualitative data from physicians and care seekers. We argue that diverging views on medicine access held by both parties do not necessarily position medical professional knowledge as opposed to lay knowledge. They are reflective of a shifting healthcare landscape and evolving expectations on provision and experiences of care services.

This article addresses people’s experiences with bacteria and the human body and examines the cultural meanings regarding concerns that society likely is running out of effective antibiotics. The empirical material comes from Sweden, and our analysis is framed through perspectives from the medical humanities. The interdisciplinary goal is to better understand the societal challenges of antibiotic resistance in the advent of a so-called post-antibiotic era. The study presents results from the “If antibiotics stop working” questionnaire which was distributed with the help of The Folklife Archives with the Scania Music Collections at Lund University. We argue that the concept of a post-antibiotic era can open a more imaginary way of thinking about what future relationships are possible if antibiotics were to lose their curative power.