Surface Tensions is an expansive, yet intimate study of how people remake themselves after catastrophic bodily change—the loss of limbs, the loss of function, the loss or replacement of organs. Against a sweeping cultural backdrop of art, popular culture, and the history of science and medicine, Manderson uses narrative epistemology based on in-depth interviews with over 300 individuals to show how they re-establish the coherence of their bodies, identities, and biographies. In addition to offering important new insights into the care, rehabilitation, and rehabituation of post-trauma patients, Manderson’s work challenges conventional ideas about the nature of embodiment and is an important contribution to medical anthropology, disability studies, and cultural studies.

Lenore Manderson is an inaugural Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts, at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia. As a medical anthropologist, public health scholar and social historian of medicine, she has been active in education and research on inequality, social exclusion and marginality, infectious and chronic disease, gender and sexuality, in Australia, Southeast and East Asia, and Africa. She has published over 500 works, including the co-edited volumes Global Health Policy, Local Realities (2000), Social Capital and Social Justice (2009), and Chronic Conditions, Fluid States (2010). She collaborated in and is the subject of the film, Nerve (USA, 2007). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the World Academy of Art and Science, and is Editor of the international journal Medical Anthropology .