Governing the Global Clinic: The Peril and Promise of the Legal Transformation of Medicine

Join in person or via Zoom us for a Global Health Politics Workshop with Carol Heimer, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation, and Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University.

HIV emerged at a time when medicine and healthcare were becoming more globalized and shifting to legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things.  It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements — and law in particular — are also crucial in shaping outcomes.  Drawing on observations and interviews in five clinics in the US, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, and in the larger world of HIV treatment and research, this study examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems.  Although law’s aspirations may have been noble, the legalization of healthcare has brought both negatives, such as rigid compliance bureaucracies, and positives, including some rethinking of what clinic staff owe their patients and research subjects.