Books by Mara Buchbinder

"Mara Buchbinder's rich description of the law, bureaucracy, and the hurdles to scripting physician aid-in-dying provides an eye-opening, sometimes disturbing answer to the question of how we can foster health care justice when it comes to assisted dying. Costs, access, community, the burden of time, and the pragmatics of choice loom large here. A provocative, necessary book."--Sharon R. Kaufman, author of Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line "This marvelous, unsettling book documents how a new law on assisted dying gets translated into practice. With sensitivity and nuance, Buchbinder describes the new forms of exclusion as well as sociality that this 'aspirational death' has created, and the dilemmas for physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and others involved."--Janelle S. Taylor, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto "The trained eye of an ethnographer sees things ordinary observers don't, and the trained eye of an ethnographer committed to careful neutrality is particularly valuable. Partisans on both sides of the debate over medical aid-in-dying should read this perceptive and informative book: it will enhance the vision of all."--Margaret Pabst Battin, author of The Least Worst Death: Essays in Bioethics on the End of Life

Although pain is a universal human experience, many view the pain of others as private, resistant to language, and, therefore, essentially unknowable. And, yet, despite the obvious limits to comprehending another's internal state, language is all that we have to translate pain from the solitary and unknowable to a phenomenon richly described in literature, medicine, and everyday life. Without denying the private dimensions of pain, All in Your Head offers an entirely fresh perspective that considers how pain may be configured, managed, explained, and even experienced in deeply relational ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a pediatric pain clinic in California, Mara Buchbinder explores how clinicians, adolescent patients, and their families make sense of puzzling symptoms and work to alleviate pain. Through careful attention to the language of pain-including narratives, conversations, models, and metaphors-and detailed analysis of how young pain sufferers make meaning through interactions with others, her book reveals that however private pain may be, making sense of it is profoundly social.