ABSTRACT
This special issue on medical ‘tourism’ draws upon the panel ‘Healing Holidays’ held at the Society for Medical Anthropology's 50th anniversary conference in 2009. The issue brings together anthropologists and historians whose work addresses the historical evolution and contemporary transformation of the traditional spa built around the iconic image of ‘taking the waters’, and the more recent phenomenon of medical ‘tourism’, with its super-speciality hospitals and clinics that repair and replace organs and body parts, or assist infertile people in their quest for conception. The final article addresses medical travel websites that serve as mediators between patients and their destinations in their itinerant quest for health.
