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Beautyscapes explores the rapidly developing global phenomenon of international medical travel, focusing specifically on patient-consumers seeking cosmetic surgery outside their home country and on those who enable them to access treatment abroad, including key figures such as surgeons and facilitators. Documenting the complex and sometimes fraught journeys of those who travel for treatment abroad, as well as the nature and power relations of the transnational IMT industry, this is the first book to focus specifically on cosmetic surgery tourism. A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Beautyscapes draws on key themes in studies of globalisation and mobility, such as gender and class, neoliberalism, social media, assemblage, conviviality and care, to explain the nature and growing popularity of cosmetic surgery tourism. The book challenges myths about vain and ill-informed travellers seeking surgery from ‘cowboy’ foreign doctors, yet also demonstrates the difficulties and dilemmas that medical tourists – especially cosmetic surgery tourists – face. Vividly illustrated with ethnographic material and with the voices of those directly involved in cosmetic surgery tourism, Beautyscapes is based on a large research project exploring cosmetic surgery journeys from Australia and China to East Asia and from the UK to Europe and North Africa.

This book explores the nature of decision making in one of the most crucial – yet also the most understudied – aspects of the regulatory system around biomedical research: research ethics committees. Every month, all over the UK, groups of people sit down and decide what kind of research should be carried out on patients within the National Health Service (NHS). These groups – Research Ethics Committees (RECs) – made up of doctors, nurses, researchers, and members of the general public, help shape the future of medicine, and play a crucial role in the regulation of a wide range of research from social science to epidemiology, vaccine and drugs trials, and surgery. Despite coming into existence in the late 1960s, and the considerable literature bemoaning the chilling effect such review has on biomedical research, we don’t know very much about how these bodies make decisions. This book provides one of the first empirical examinations of this kind of regulation, drawing on observational, interview, and archival data to give in-depth ethnographic insight into RECs, as they operate in the UK NHS. A key insight of this work is that, despite the trappings of a modern regulatory system – the operating procedures, guidance documents, and websites – NHS REC decision making revolves around very old-fashioned aspects of social life such as interpersonal trust, reputation, and the performance of character, and that an accurate understanding of this kind of regulation requires an acceptance of the inherently social nature of the processes involved.