Biomedical Odysseys is an anthropological reflection on the experiences of foreign patients who engage with experimental foetal cell therapy developed and operated by medical entrepreneurs in contemporary, urban China. Priscilla Song challenges the “easy story” of “desperate patients duped by medical charlatans peddling false hope with their quack therapies” with “an anthropology of transnational regenerative medicine” where hope takes a central place in the odysseys that Song traces from cyberspace to China (pp. 2–3).
This book derives from Song's doctoral research at a hospital in Beijing and from her studies on the internet, in particular patients’ forums and blogs, between 2004 and 2007. Song's shorter visits at other sites of experimental medicine in China between 2004 and 2015 are also included. Song uses a set of comparisons to analyse her rich data. She highlights the differences between China and the United States on the political economy of biomedical innovation, health care systems and institutional settings. She also provides nuanced analyses of how patients experience and assess experimental foetal cell therapy in a variety of ways according to their diseases and specific bodily, family and social-economic conditions, including care practice, moral values and religious beliefs. These differences, Song reveals, all contribute to the sustained transnational pursuit of experimental foetal cell therapy.
Song deploys a set of metaphors to explicate the evidence. In addition to “odysseys” and “cutting edge” that are key to her conceptualization of the transnational operation and pursuit of experimental biomedical therapy (Epilogue), “cyberanatomies” of hope depicts the spatial and temporal dimensions of hope (p. 72), and ping-pong edge ball and red-hatting (pp. 149–151) illuminate how entrepreneurial tactics are conditioned by China's health care reform and exercised by healthcare professionals and their institutions.
In three parts, the book weaves the experiences of (mostly) American and European patients, and Chinese healthcare professionals, with experimental foetal cell therapy. The first part focuses on the prior to and during surgery experiences of patients and carers. Song demonstrates that digital communication technologies such as internet forums and blogs play a key role in the daily life of patients and carers and their biomedical odysseys. This is most evident among patients with spinal cord injuries who frequented the CareCure forum, formed “cybersociality,” and engaged in the “cure movement” wherein experimental foetal cell therapy surfaced as a potential treatment in late 2002 (chapter two).
The second part explains how Dr Huang Hongyun and his team utilized technoscientific advancement in the United States and the evolving social-political conditions in China to develop and operate experimental foetal cell therapy in various institutional settings in contemporary, urban China. Dr Huang's story, Song suggests, represents how “a new breed of medical entrepreneurs leverages a global clientele in the context of cutting-edge regenerative medicine at a particular historical moment in the fraught politics of China's health care reforms” (p. 130).
The third part brings together patients, carers and healthcare professionals in their individual and collective evaluation of experimental foetal cell therapy. For example, we discover how Dr Huang's team encountered difficulties conducting follow-up studies of treated patients and how foreign patients discussed online treatment experiences and bodily responses. Song reveals the complexity and fluidity in defining, collecting and analysing evidence on the effectiveness of experimental therapy, and discusses the ethics and epistemology of clinical experimentation.
Biomedical Odysseys demonstrates the strength of anthropological research that spans multiple terrains and traces the origin and development of experimental biomedical therapy that excites some and dismays some others. The ethnographic insight that Song presents on the experiences of patients and carers shakes the static image of “desperate patients duped by medical charlatans in third-world countries” (xii).
Song's contention that Dr Huang's enterprise and experiences “embody the emerging culture of medical entrepreneurialism in late socialist China” (p. 130), however, falls slightly short. Biomedical entrepreneurship is promoted by governments, scientists and industrialists in China, yet takes various forms that are in competition with one another. Dr Huang and his team's biomedical odyssey presents Song with an illuminating case study. However, compared with her detailed analysis and to some extent, counterargument against American and European researchers’ and regulators’ criticism of Dr Huang's experimental practice, Song engages little with the intense debate that Dr Huang's enterprise evoked within China. This oversight is partly due to Song's representation of China along a modular timeline of “post-Mao” or “post-Deng” or “late and post-socialist” and, in contrast, she writes about the “West.” Bracketing China in this way costs Song an analytical edge to enrich our understanding of contemporary China. Nevertheless, attentive readers will find interesting materials in this book to inform their own inquiries about contemporary China.
This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate teaching on a range of courses covering medical anthropology, sociology, media and culture studies, methodology and research methods, and introductions to China studies.
