Beyond Disease

Our Beyond Disease theme examines how developments in biomedicine challenge established ideas about particular diseases and raises questions about what counts as disease and how disease fits within society and culture.

Theme Summary

The way disease is understood shapes how we organise and deliver healthcare. It shapes how biomedical science is managed and funded, and which kinds of knowledge are considered important and relevant to health. This impacts individuals’ experiences of health and illness in unique ways.  For example, new understanding of tumours in cancer research brings new treatment options and disrupts conventional schemes of classification. Meanwhile, population research into cancer biomarkers leads to new categories of risk, bringing new ‘patients-in-waiting’ under medical management.

Our Beyond Disease theme engages debates over disability, normality, ‘naturalness’, and enhancement and challenges concepts of disease and therapy. Using academic research, public engagement, and rapid-response papers, the theme interrogates increasing costs, earlier preventive interventions, and ever-multiplying ways individuals seek to access biomedical technologies add uncertainty to what counts as health, illness, and disease - and who benefits from those labels.

Our core research questions include:

What is the nature of disease in contemporary societies?
Who has the authority to label particular diseases?
What is the subjective significance of disease classification?
What frameworks can we use to interrogate the idea of disease?

Engagement and Outputs

Disease, vulnerability, and normality

Our Beyond Disease team has written a position paper about the intersection of vulnerability and disease. Using a cross-disciplinary lens and the perspectives of over ten CBSS affiliates, the paper takes COVID-19 as a case study and argues that making the boundary between ‘disease’ and ‘normality’ less rigid could make the social management of disease more just. It is currently under review.

Immunity and biomedicine

Our Beyond Disease fellow Andrea Ford and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow Julia Swallow organized a workshop (February 2021) investigating the contemporary manifestations of immunity and the immune system in biomedicine. They are now editing a special journal issue on the theme, in press with Medicine Anthropology Theory. Contributors are social scientists drawn from around the world, who are conducting research on topics as diverse as antibiotic resistance, the placenta, cancer, dementia, and inflammation.

Endometriosis and hormones

Our Beyond Disease fellow Andrea conducts research on endometriosis, a poorly-understood disease that is difficult to categorize, diagnose, and treat. Her project examines how environmental chemicals mimic and alter hormone function.

Andrea uses public engagement to explore endometriosis in society. In January 2021, she organised an interdisciplinary event called 'Hormones and the shifting frontiers of disease' with medical science colleagues. This will be followed by a Brocher Foundation workshop in December 2022. The group who contributes to this event series has also written collaboratively for the popular anthology So Hormonal and they are editing a book that playfully imitates a medical glossary, called 'Hormonal Theory' (in press with Bloomsbury).

In August 2022, Andrea delivered a CODI show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival called ‘My hormones made me do it!’

Psychiatry, diagnosis, and disorder

Our Beyond Disease co-lead Martyn Pickersgill explores how the psychiatric diagnosis process and psychiatric disorders themselves are being reimagined through biomedical research and clinical practice (supported by The Wellcome Trust). He also conducts research with psychiatrists themselves to explore everyday idioms of distress and how these can shape population studies (supported by the Medical Research Council).