Tarryn Phillips is an anthropologist and lecturer in Legal Studies at La Trobe University. Her interests lie in social justice and inequality. She researches how medicine and the law manage uncertainty, define and punish deviance and interact with their socio-cultural surroundings
"""[This book] promises to be a very valuable work by a scholar who is already starting to be recognised in this field. The topic – the processes by which environmental illnesses become recognised by medicine and by the law – is a very important one. The focus, multiple chemical sensitivity, is perhaps the king of contested illnesses, inherently raising issues over its definition and causality."" Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright, University of Oxford ""The use of the detailed personal narratives of various actors in the medico-legal field of MCS is brilliant ethnography; it brings the abstract legal and medical questions of cause and effect into focus in a very human, not to say humane, way. Given the poignancy of the stories the author tells, and their human interest, I suspect that this is one of those relatively rare cases in which a scholarly book will have appeal beyond the academic realm."" Louis E. Wolcher, Charles I. Stone Professor of Law, University of Washington"