Medical Anthropology

A significant update of the 1990 classic state-of-the-art handbook on medical anthropology. With new chapters on AIDS, psychology and emotion, nutrition, and bioethics, the text reflects the changes in medical anthropological theory and practice since the late 1980s. Chapters from the first edition are revised to reflect current trends and to include recent references. This work demonstrates the creative expansion and diversity in the field, amidst efforts to explore the individual sickness experience in the context of local cultures and global political and economic dynamics.

A critical examination of the field and study of medical anthropology in the world system.

This long-awaited revision of what has now become the classic text in medical anthropology contains a wealth of new material on subjects as diverse as aging, creativity, and ideology. Originally cited in American Anthropologist as "must reading for all medical anthropologists, physicians, advanced medical anthropology students and advanced medical students," this new edition should prove twice as valuable. It is both a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly growing field of medical anthropology and a state-of-the-art reference work. The authors bring new perspectives to our understanding of both Western and non-Western medicine, from the biochemical and physiological aspects of health care in preindustrialized cultures to cultural and ideological factors inherent in past and present Western medical care. New chapters focus on ethnobotany, placebo and pain, shamanism, and psychiatry.

The field of medical anthropology is a discipline that incorporates the perspective of a wide range of approaches--from anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, physicians, nurses, public health administrators, biologists, and many others, including the general public--to health care. This approach places culture and cultural relativism at the forefront and center of every model, and examines the ethics and fairness of health care issues associated with the African American population.

Plague Doctors highlights culturally based differences between French and American medicine, not only in health care delivery, but in the way each system constructs the interaction between disease and the human body. This work challenges the assumption that biomedicine is uniform across the western world. The author, a medical doctor and anthropologist, provides an ethnographic look into the daily experiences of physicians and researchers, examining how members of the French and American medical communities construct their models of AIDS through discourse and practice. The book is based on a comparative study of two AIDS clinics, one in Chicago and the other in Paris. Participant observation conducted at the clinics and interviews with physicians and researchers outside the sites yielded important insights into the world of AIDS medicine.

This book offers detailed ethnographic studies from Africa & the Caribbean to explain AIDS in a global & comparative third-world context. The essays move beyond medical or epidemiological models, explaining the epidemic in its economic, social, political, & historic contexts.

Societies in transition are often faced with new settings and/or new diseases that require a response in order for the affected group to thrive or survive. A lack of effective response by a transitional population to a new pathogen can lead to the group's disintegration. In a broad selection of 19 essays by distinguished researchers, the epidemiology and health status of prehistoric, historical, and present day populations in transition are thoroughly explored. Different models--biomedical, ethnomedical, ecological, and politicoeconomic--are used to illustrate the effects of transition on the health of human populations throughout the world.

Are pain and injury managed appropriately in the environment of commercial sport? Is sports medicine a tool to empower or to disempower athletes? This book considers these and other pertinent concerns as it questions whether, in the world of modern sport, it is the participants themselves or the sport's administrators who exert more control over athletes' well being. It is asserted that, because of the distinctive nature of sport, the power to transform medical practice and application of sports medicine lies not with physicians but within the practices of sport itself. Sport, Professionalism and Pain bridges a perceived space in the literature between medical anthropology, medical sociology and sport studies, examining issues such as: * the relationship between sports medicine, the body and culture * the power struggle between sport administrators and participants * the historical transformation of sports medicine.