In Normandy, near Rouen, in Tournedos-sur-Seine and Val-de-Reuil, two adult skeletons thrown into wells during the Middle Ages have been studied. The wells are located at two separate sites just 3 km apart. Both sites consist of clustered settlements inhabited from the seventh to the tenth century and arranged around a cemetery. The backfill of the well shafts contains animal remains, but also partially or completely articulated human bodies. In Val-de-Reuil, the incomplete skeleton of a man, probably representing a secondary deposition, had traces of a violent blow on the skull, certainly with a blunt weapon. In Tournedos-sur-Seine, a woman thrown in headfirst had several impact points and bone fractures on the skull that could have been caused by perimortem mistreatment or a violent death. After a detailed description of the two finds and a contextualisation in the light of similar published cases, we will discuss the possible scenarios for the death and deposition of the individuals as well as their place in their communities.
The aim of this article is to shed light on the conditions under which the funerary management of human remains was carried out by the French authorities during the early years of the First World War. It seeks to understand how the urgent need to clear the battlefield as quickly as possible came into conflict with the aspiration to give all deceased an individualised, or at the very least dignified, burial. Old military funerary practices were overturned and reconfigured to incorporate an ideal that sought the individual identification of citizen soldiers. The years 1914–15 were thus profoundly marked by a clash between the pragmatism of public health authorities obsessed with hygiene, the infancy of emerging forensic science, the aching desire of the nation to see its children buried individually and various political and military imperatives related to the conduct of the war.
This article studies one of the humanitarian challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis: the dignified handling of the mortal remains of individuals that have died from COVID-19 in Muslim contexts. It illustrates the discussion with examples from Sunni Muslim-majority states when relevant, such as Egypt, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and Pakistan, and examples from English-speaking non-Muslim majority states such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and Australia as well as Sri Lanka. The article finds that the case of the management of dead bodies of people who have died from COVID-19 has shown that the creativity and flexibility enshrined in the Islamic law-making logic and methodology, on the one hand, and the cooperation between Muslim jurists and specialised medical and forensic experts, on the other, have contributed to saving people’s lives and mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Muslim contexts.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Kabye country, some heads of enemies – those of men foreign to the group – were buried in a mound of earth referred to as hude, meaning ‘manure’. In each locality, this mound is situated inside a wooded sanctuary where the spirit of the mythical founding ancestor resides. In order to understand this practice, this article examines how it fitted within the overall logic of the male initiation cycle, contextualising it in relation to past and present practices. Because it was a highly ambivalent element of the bush, the head of an enemy renewed the generative power of this original ‘manure’ prodigiously, so as to ensure the group’s survival in their land. The burial of the heads of strangers appears to be an initiatory variant of other forms of mastery of the ambivalence of wild forces, entrusted in other African societies to the chief and his waste heap.
Chapter 7 considers non-participation and exclusions as well as reservation, consternation and rejections around genomic medicine in our research and in the public sphere more generally. We investigate the particular social and cultural contexts in which disengagement and resistance are generated. Exploring negative views and experiences or simply a lack of response to genomic medicine, we consider when these kinds of personalised medicine are ‘not relevant to us’ and why some people just do not have the capacity or resource to engage with them. Rejecting or refusing opportunities to engage with genomic medicine also results from the awareness of competing priorities such as health equality or preventive healthcare as well as a commitment to other forms of care. Not every patient can or wants to craft their own treatment pathways, or looks to the future with a sense of agency and control, and we reflect on what it means to opt out, be excluded or feel left behind by these kinds of research and care. We also discuss the ways in which different agencies and actors strive to tackle disengagement by reaching out to different communities to appeal to their sense of responsibility towards contributing to the prospects of better care for individuals and community now and in the future. We argue that these practices present an important counterpoint to the dominant, inclusive vision of P4 medicine, particularly with regard to personalisation and participation.
Chapter 2 explores the promise of prediction and prevention of recurrence in personalised medicine for some kinds of breast cancer through the case of a genomic technique already widely adopted within the NHS across the UK: gene-expression profiling. We consider a genomic test, Oncotype DX, which seeks to identify, among early breast cancer patients, those who would or would not benefit from chemotherapy to prevent future recurrence. The aim here is to limit exposure to chemotherapy, which can be toxic and debilitating. The test was promoted to the health service, practitioners and patients as a means of prediction and prevention, including via practitioners’ and patients’ contributions to processes of regulatory and clinical decision making surrounding the test. Considering how the test was envisaged as a benefit to the NHS and to patients in policy, practitioner and patient accounts of their experiences of decision making regarding chemotherapy, we explore how it fitted in with already complex cancer experiences and hopes for a cancer-free future. We look at how the narrative that the test offers reassurance and prediction came to dominate policy, but also consider situations where prediction and prevention were more contingent and provisional, particularly in the context of clinical encounters.
Chapter 5 is about large-scale national studies, recruiting patients with a range of cancers to collect extensive molecular information about cancer and ultimately inform routine patient care via precision medicine. We focus on Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. After discussing the rise of these mass-participation initiatives and their strong national imaginaries of economic development and cutting-edge healthcare, we explore how practitioners, patients and families made sense of participation, and how this related to their investments in particular institutions and futures. We explore the participatory logic of these initiatives, and the ways in which informed consent processes and genomic literacy agendas were developed and enacted to increase participation. We contrast efforts to improve genomic literacy and informed consent by clearly demarcating personal benefits in terms of improved care from the research dividend to the NHS, but with blurred boundaries in practice. Patients and family members were seeking care through participation and reworking efforts to improve their understanding to establish their worth as a patient and ensure optimal, personalised care into the future. We explore how this was managed by professionals to meet the aims of the programme despite their reservations about its value and implications.
While many cancer patients experience molecular diagnostics and targeted therapies as part of standard treatment or through clinical trials provided free-of-charge through the NHS, others turn to private providers to craft their own care pathways, utilising private health insurance, savings, taking out loans or raising money via crowdfunding online. In Chapter 6, we explore how practitioners, patients and their relatives seek to tailor their care and treatment pathways via these kinds of engagements with private healthcare. We examine ambivalence about access to expensive experimental treatments as part of NHS or private care, and draw associations between optimisation, actionability and adaptability via personalised diagnosis and therapies and patient entrepreneurship, and the intensified responsibilities for health and healthcare therein. Through this exploration we situate personalisation in relation to transformations in citizenship and consumption via social media platforms, and argue that this brings another layer of care, biosociality and identity work for patients and their relatives as they navigate the hope and social obligations of personalised cancer therapies.
In this chapter we introduce the topics, case studies and the main themes of the book, exploring the medical and scientific, political and economic backdrop to personalised cancer medicine as the context for our study. After briefly outlining our methodology, we describe our orientation to the subject, the key questions and academic influences we have drawn upon and introduce each of the chapters to follow.