Chapter: Medical travel/tourism and the city

Heidi Kaspar (Careum Forschung, Switzerland) and I have a chapter in the newly released Routledge Handbook of Global Urban Health, edited by Igor Vojnovic, Amber L. Pearson, Gershim Asiki, Geoff de Verteuil and Adriana Allen. Special thanks to Pyo Ahn for his photos of the cosmetic surgery clinics in Seoul!

Due to their high densities of people, infrastructure and diverse economic functions, cities are widely recognised sites within which advanced medical care concentrates. As such, given their centrality within regional networks, cities have long served as regional medical hubs for populations in their national hinterlands. In our chapter, we look at how a growing number of cities around the world interact with and are articulated through transnational medical travel and tourism. We discuss the ways in which transnational patients; information, standards and social norms; and the financial capital undergirding privatised healthcare consumption assemble with and articulate themselves in unique forms in and with these places.