To help kick off a new year of articles, books, and highlights, Springer is featuring the June 2016 special issue of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, The Clinic in Crisis: Medicine and Politics in the Context of Social Upheaval, as part of a larger group of Special Issues in Social Sciences. Each article in the special issue is available for free here until February 3, 2017.

Over the summer we spotlighted several original papers from this special issue:

1. Salih Can Aciksoz’s Medical Humanitarianism Under Atmospheric Violence: Health Professionals in the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey
2. Emma Varley’s Abandonments, Solidarities and Logics of Care: Hospitals as Sites of Sectarian Conflict in Gilgit-Baltistan
3. Elly Teman, Tsipy Ivry, and Heela Goren’s Obligatory Effort [Hishtadlut] as an Explanatory Model: A Critique of Reproductive Choice and Control

Each highlighted article discusses medical neutrality in areas of political conflict and how clinical space can be an extension of violence. While many clinicians strive to maintain an environment of safety and neutrality in the hospitals and clinics, the locations are routinely entangled with positions of violent local and international political struggles. The ethnographic accounts in each of the featured articles address the concept of “medical neutrality” – the ethical norm that medicine should be practiced impartially – in the context of conflict and social unrest, and suggest medical neutrality may work as a tool that is deeply cultural, social, and political.