Tinkering with symptoms, causes and solutions: Tracing the enactments of multiple chronic illnesses in specialised outpatient check-ups

Making it Work: Everyday Life and Healthcare with Multiple Chronic Illnesses in Denmark

A growing concern in clinical literature with the "treatment burden" of living with multimorbidity raises questions about how we can study and produce knowledge on the impact of health care. In this article, we draw on ethnographic material from fieldwork among people with multimorbidity in Denmark and recent theorization on "values" in health care, to show how an ongoing "trying out" and ways of "just getting on with it" are enacted in illness trajectories marked by multimorbidity. Our findings point to the importance of attending to the subject positions that particular healthcare relations and encounters make possible.

Expanding Medical Semiotics

This special issue explores the evolving landscape of medical semiotics of conventional biomedicine. With expansion we refer to the range of phenomena considered signs or symptoms of underlying disease, but also the growing anthropological attention to the medical sign system in ways which reach beyond classic semiotic analysis. The articles testify to the expansion in terms of empirical foci and theoretical contributions. As part of the introduction, we discuss three modes of reading symptoms within medical anthropology: the hermeneutic, material, and critical readings, all highlighting the crucial role of medical anthropology in understanding the biosocial and cultural dimensions of medical semiotics.