What counts as knowledge and expertise and how these are produced, afforded authority to underpin practice—in diverse health-related settings—is a theme explored in many of the books published in the HTS Series. Extracts from four books help us to understand how knowledge and associated evidence claims are produced, how they gain value yet are often contested, and how they shape the framing of the meaning of (ill) health by diverse actors, and what is to count as its management and treatment. The four books are:
Brosnan et al. (Eds.) (Complementary and alternative medicine. Exploring health and technology through personal medical devices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) challenge the assumption that complementary and alternative medicine is outside of conventional biomedical orthodoxy to show how it has been incorporated into biomedical and its knowledge production.
Michael and Rosengarten (Innovation and biomedicine. Ethics, evidence and expectation in HIV. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) focus on the development and testing through a randomised control trial (RCT) of a drug to treat HIV.
Sleeboom-Faulkner (Global morality and life science practices in Asia. Assemblages of life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) takes us into the related but much broader area of biotechnology, especially in regard to genetic testing and biobanks, in China, India, and Japan.
Mesman (Uncertainty and medical innovation: Experienced pioneers in neonatal care. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) examines how staff on a neonatal intensive care intervene differently in the constitution of knowledge and how this may lead to frictions in the decisions about responsibility, timing, and end of life.