ABSTRACT
This chapter engages the practices of medical tourism involving the exchange of body parts through attention to scarcity and inter-corporeality in terms of their real and imagined relations and tensions. It then focuses on the lived and imagined ways of framing the relations and tensions of scarcity and inter-corporeality in the case of transplant tourism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA estimate that up to 750,000 residents of the USA now travel abroad for medical care each year, a figure likely to be a conservative estimate, since much of the travel is likely to go undocumented. Geographers have begun to engage the phenomenon of medical tourism through two broad approaches or fields of study: as part of health systems and health services research and as part of research on neoliberalisation and globalisation. The dominant analytical discourse related to the global movement of organs for transplant reflects work on medical tourism more widely.
