MeST lunch seminar by Rebecca Lynch: Hepatic logics and the fluid body: Caring for liver disease in the UK’s NHS

Liver disease is typically understood as a problem of an organ, but a focus on everyday practices and concerns points us towards considering liver disease through the problem of fluids. Fore-fronting fluids allows another way into the disease, its relationality, and situatedness. Fluids are often neglected in the body, seen as ‘of the body’ rather than an intrinsic element of it. Attending to fluids shifts biomedical hierarchies, allowing what may be neglected to become more evident and raising consideration as to how (else) we might care (Puig de la Bellcasa, 2011). We are also moved away from understanding the body as static and bounded into working with movement, flow, and fluidity. These are, I suggest, more generative ways of situating liver disease in relation to its progression, and care, and to more recent developments in biomedical understandings and intervention. Focusing on specific technologies used in liver healthcare services (transplantation and paracentesis) I explore these different ‘logics’ of liver disease drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in specialist liver units within the UK’s national health service (NHS).

Dr Rebecca Lynch is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Science and Medicine at the University of Exeter. With a focus on materiality, she has a particular interest in the anthropology of the body and biomedicine. Her research draws on different cases within biomedicine and beyond to explore the dynamic, changing, fluid body and its boundaries, health technologies, moral aspects of health, and (bio)medical categorisations.

Everybody is welcome!