Cosmetic surgery tourism is a recent outgrowth of economic and cultural globalization that has received little scholarly attention. This dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina will use observations, interviews, and analysis of secondary data to investigate the local development and effects of cosmetic surgery tourism in Costa Rica. Long popular as a nature tourism destination, Costa Rica is now recognized in North America for its state-of-the-art medical facilities and internationally trained clinicians. Increasing numbers of "medical tourists" arrive in Costa Rica each year, seeking both a vacation and an inexpensive medical or dental procedure, most popularly cosmetic surgery.
Cosmetic surgery tourism in Costa Rica will be examined first, as a set of social practices that may be informed by assumptions about travel as inherently transformative and by Costa Rica's reputation in North America as a political, economic and environmental exception among developing countries. Secondly, cosmetic surgery tourism will be investigated in relation to rising healthcare costs in the U.S. and the partial privatization of Costa Rica's state-sponsored health care system. This study will consider how desires for and experiences of bodily transformation are reshaped through travel to Costa Rica and residence in "recovery resorts," and how medical tourism produces new articulations between Costa Rica's thriving private medical sector and its overburdened and under funded public sector. By offering a case study of the local impacts of global circulations of medical technologies and patients, this investigation will further understanding of how political and economic conditions shape biomedical practices as well as perceptions of gender and aging.
