Evolutionary medicine has been steadily gaining recognition, not only in modern clinical research and practice, but also in bioarchaeology (the study of archaeological human remains) and especially its sub-discipline, palaeopathology. To date, however, palaeopathology has not been necessarily recognised as particularly useful to the field and most key texts in evolutionary medicine have tended to overlook it. This novel text is the first to highlight the benefits of using palaeopathological research to answer questions about the evolution of disease and its application to current health problems, as well as the benefits of using evolutionary thinking in medicine to help interpret historical disease processes. It presents hypothesis-driven research by experts in biological anthropology (including palaeopathology), medicine, health sciences, and evolutionary medicine through a series of unique case studies that address specific research questions. Each chapter has been co-authored by two or more researchers with different disciplinary perspectives in order to provide original, insightful, and interdisciplinary contributions that will provide new insights for both palaeopathology and evolutionary medicine. Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine is intended for graduate level students and professional researchers in a wide range of fields including the humanities (history), social sciences (anthropology, archaeology, palaeopathology, geography), and life sciences (medicine and biology). Relevant courses include evolutionary medicine, evolutionary anthropology, medical anthropology, and palaeopathology.

Why people kill themselves remains an enduring and unanswered question. With a focus on Sri Lanka, a country that for several decades has reported 'epidemic' levels of suicidal behaviour, this book develops a unique perspective linking the causes and meanings of suicidal practices to social processes across moments, lifetimes and history. Extending anthropological approaches to practice, learning and agency, anthropologist Tom Widger draws from long-term fieldwork in a Sinhala Buddhist community to develop an ethnographic theory of suicide that foregrounds local knowledge and sets out a charter for prevention. The book highlights the motives of children and adults becoming suicidal and how certain gender, age, class relationships and violence are prone to give rise to suicidal responses. By linking these experiences to emotional states, it develops an ethnopsychiatric model of suicide rooted in social practice. Widger then goes on to examine how suicides are resolved at village and national levels, tracing the roots of interventions to the politics of colonial and post-colonial social welfare and health regimes. Exploring local accounts of suicide as both 'evidence' for the suicide epidemic and as an 'ethos' of suicidality shaping subjective worlds, Suicide in Sri Lanka shows how anthropological analysis can offer theoretical as well as policy insights. With the inclusion of straightforward summaries and implications for prevention at the end of each chapter, this book has relevance for specialists and non-specialists alike. It represents an important new contribution to South Asian Studies, Social Anthropology and Medical Anthropology, as well as to cross-cultural Suicidology.

Breastfeeding: New Anthropological Approaches unites sociocultural, biological, and archaeological anthropological scholarship to spark new conversations and research about breastfeeding. While breastfeeding has become the subject of intense debate in many settings, anthropological perspectives have played a limited role in these conversations. The present volume seeks to broaden discussions around breastfeeding by showcasing fresh insights gleaned from an array of theoretical and methodological approaches, which are grounded in the close study of people across the globe. Drawing on case studies and analyses of key issues in the field, the book highlights the power of anthropological research to illuminate the evolutionary, historical, biological, and sociocultural context of the complex, lived experience of breastfeeding. By bringing together researchers across three anthropological subfields, the volume seeks to produce transformative knowledge about human lactation, breastfeeding, and human milk. This book is a key resource for scholars of medical and biological anthropology, evolutionary biology, bioarchaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and human development. Lactation professionals and peer supporters, midwives, and others who support infant feeding will find the book an essential read.

Winner of the Reader Views Literary Award, Societal Issues and the Reviewers Choice Best Non-fiction Book of the Year, Specialty Awards, Schooled on Fat explores how body image, social status, fat stigma and teasing, food consumption behaviors, and exercise practices intersect in the daily lives of adolescent girls and boys. Based on nine months of fieldwork at a high school located near Tucson, Arizona, the book draws on social, linguistic, and theoretical contexts to illustrate how teens navigate the fraught realities of body image within a high school culture that reinforced widespread beliefs about body size as a matter of personal responsibility while offering limited opportunity to exercise and an abundance of fattening junk foods. Taylor also traces policy efforts to illustrate where we are as a nation in addressing childhood obesity and offers practical strategies schools and parents can use to promote teen wellness. This book is ideal for courses on the body, fat studies, gender studies, language and culture, school culture and policy, public ethnography, deviance, and youth culture.

Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire presents the first analytical account in English of the history of subsistence crises and epidemic diseases in Late Antiquity. Based on a catalogue of all such events in the East Roman/Byzantine empire between 284 and 750, it gives an authoritative analysis of the causes, effects and internal mechanisms of these crises and incorporates modern medical and physiological data on epidemics and famines. Its interest is both in the history of medicine and the history of Late Antiquity, especially its social and demographic aspects. Stathakopoulos develops models of crises that apply not only to the society of the late Roman and early Byzantine world, but also to early modern and even contemporary societies in Africa or Asia. This study is therefore both a work of reference for information on particular events (e.g. the 6th-century Justinianic plague) and a comprehensive analysis of subsistence crises and epidemics as agents of historical causation. As such it makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate on Late Antiquity, bringing a fresh perspective to comment on the characteristic features that shaped this period and differentiate it from Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic" disciplines. The rise of epigenetics in particular signals a shift from notions of biological fixedness to ideas of plasticity and "impressionability" of biological material. This book investigates a long history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology, starting with ancient medicine, and analyses the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement or possibly reconfiguration of earlier plastic views. Finally, it analyses the returning of plasticity to contemporary postgenomic views and argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community, with important implications for notions of risk, responsibility and intervention.

Psychiatric Encounters presents an intimate portrait of a public inpatient psychiatric facility in the Southeastern state of Yucatan, Mexico. The book explores the experiences of patients and psychiatrists as they navigate the challenges of public psychiatric care in Mexico. While international reports condemning conditions in Mexican psychiatric institutions abound, Psychiatric Encounters considers the large- and small-scale obstacles to quality care encountered by doctors and patients alike as they struggle to live and act like human beings under inhumane conditions. Beatriz Mireya Reyes-Foster closely examines the impact of the Mexican state's neoliberal health reforms on how patients access care and doctors perform their duties. Engaging with madness, modernity, and identity, Psychiatric Encounters considers the enduring role of colonialism in the context of Mexico's troubled contemporary mental health care institutions.

Evolution and Medicine provides an accessible introduction to the new field of evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary concepts help explain why we remain vulnerable to disease, how pathogens and cancer cells evolve, and how the diseases that affected our evolutionary ancestors have shaped our biology. The book interweaves the presentation of evolutionary principles with examples that illustrate how an evolutionary perspective enhances our understanding of disease. It discusses the theory of evolution by natural selection, the genetic basis of evolutionary change, evolutionary life history theory, and host-pathogen coevolution, and uses these concepts to provide new insights into diseases such as cystic fibrosis, cancer, sexually transmitted diseases, and malaria, incorporating the latest research in rapidly developing fields such as epigenetics and the study of the human microbiome. The book concludes with a discussion of the ways in which recent, culturally constructed changes in the human environment are increasing the prevalence of man-made diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, and are exacerbating socioeconomic disparities in health. Just as evolutionary biology is concerned with populations and with changes in populations over time, evolutionary medicine is concerned with the health of populations. Evolution and Medicine emphasizes the role of demographic processes in evolution and disease, and stresses the importance of improving population health as a strategy for improving the health of individuals. This accessible text is written primarily for physicians, biomedical scientists, and both premedical and medical students, and will appeal to all readers with a background or interest in medicine.

Rapid advances in high-throughput genome sequencing technologies foreshadow a near-future in which millions of individuals will gain affordable access to their complete genome sequence. This promises to offer unprecedented insights into the fundamental biological nature of ourselves and our species: where we came from, how we begin our lives, how we develop and grow, how we interact with our environment, how we get sick, how we get well, and how we age. Personal genomics is an essential component of the inevitable transition towards personalized health and medicine. As the medical establishment begins to explore and evaluate the role of personal genomics in health and medicine, both clinicians and patients alike will gain from becoming well versed in both the power and the pitfalls of personal genomic information. Furthermore, it is likely that all students of the biomedical sciences will soon be required to gain crucial understanding in the emerging field of personal genomics. Exploring Personal Genomics provides a novel, inquiry-based approach to the understanding and interpretation of the practical, medical, physiological, and societal aspects of personal genomic information. The material is presented in two parts: the first provides readers of all backgrounds with a fundamental understanding of the biology of human genomes, information on how to obtain and understand digital representations of personal genomic data, tools and techniques for exploring the personal genomics of ancestry and genealogy, discovery and interpretation of genetic trait associations, and the role of personal genomics in drug response. The second part offers more advanced readers an understanding of the science, tools, and techniques for investigating interactions between a personal genome and the environment, connecting DNA to physiology, and assessing rare variants and structural variation. This book aims to support undergraduate and graduate studies in medicine, genetics, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. Additionally, the design of the content is such that medical practitioners, professionals working in the biomedical sciences or related fields, and motivated lay individuals interested in exploring their personal genetic data should find it relevant and approachable.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death worldwide today, but are not just a modern phenomenon. To explore the deep roots of CVDs in human history, this book, for the first time, brings together bioarchaeological evidence from different periods, as old as 5000 BC, and geographic locations from Alaska to Northern Africa. Experts in their fields showcase the powerful tool set available to bioarchaeology, which allows a more comprehensive reconstruction of the human past through evidence for disease. The tools include aDNA and histological analyses and digital imaging techniques for studying skeletal and mummified human remains. The insights gained from these studies are not only of value to historical research but also demonstrate how the science of archaeological human remains can provide the long view of the history of disease and contributes to modern biomedical research within the context of evolutionary medicine.

This open access edited book brings together new research on the mechanisms by which maternal and reproductive health policies are formed and implemented in diverse locales around the world, from global policy spaces to sites of practice. The authors - both internationally respected anthropologists and new voices - demonstrate the value of ethnography and the utility of reproduction as a lens through which to generate rich insights into professionals' and lay people's intimate encounters with policy. Authors look closely at core policy debates in the history of global maternal health across six different continents, including: Women's use of misoprostol for abortion in Burkina Faso The place of traditional birth attendants in global maternal health Donor-driven maternal health programs in Tanzania Efforts to integrate qualitative evidence in WHO maternal and child health policy-making Anthropologies of Global Maternal and Reproductive Health will engage readers interested in critical conversations about global health policy today. The broad range of foci makes it a valuable resource for teaching in medical anthropology, anthropology of reproduction, and interdisciplinary global health programs. The book will also find readership amongst critical public health scholars, health policy and systems researchers, and global public health practitioners.

The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology provides a contemporary overview of the key themes in medical anthropology. In this exciting departure from conventional handbooks, compendia and encyclopedias, the three editors have written the core chapters of the volume, and in so doing, invite the reader to reflect on the ethnographic richness and theoretical contributions of research on the clinic and the field, bioscience and medical research, infectious and non-communicable diseases, biomedicine, complementary and alternative modalities, structural violence and vulnerability, gender and ageing, reproduction and sexuality. As a way of illustrating the themes, a rich variety of case studies are included, presented by over 60 authors from around the world, reflecting the diverse cultural contexts in which people experience health, illness, and healing. Each chapter and its case studies are introduced by a photograph, reflecting medical and visual anthropological responses to inequality and vulnerability. An indispensible reference in this fastest growing area of anthropological study, The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology is a unique and innovative contribution to the field.

This book provides a definitive account of koro, a topic of long-standing interest in the field of cultural psychiatry in which the patient displays a fear of the genitals shrinking and retracting. Written by Professor A.N. Chowdhury, a leading expert in the field, it provides a comprehensive overview of the cultural, historical and clinical significance of the condition that includes both cutting-edge critique and an analysis of research and accounts from the previous 120 years published literature. The book begins by outlining the definition, etymology of the term, and clinical features of koro as a culture-bound syndrome, and contextualizes the concept with reference to its historical origins and local experience in Southeast Asia, and its subsequent widespread occurrence in South Asia. It also critically examines the concept of culture-bound disorder and the development of the terminology, such as cultural concepts of distress, which is the term that is currently used in the DSM-5. Subsequent chapters elaborate the cultural context of koro in Chinese and South Asian cultures, including cultural symbolic analysis of associations with animals (fox and turtle) and phallic imagery based on troubling self-perceived aspects of body image that is central to the concept. The second section of the book offers a comprehensive, global literature review, before addressing the current status and relevance of koro, clinically relevant questions of risk assessment and forensic issues, and research methodology. This landmark work will provide a unique resource for clinicians and researchers working in cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, anthropology, medical sociology, social work and psychosexual medicine.

This book addresses the over-prescribing of antidepressants in people with mostly mild and subthreshold depression. It outlines the steep increase in antidepressant prescription and critically examines the current scientific evidence on the efficacy and safety of antidepressants in depression. The book is not only concerned with the conflicting views as to whether antidepressants are useful or ineffective in various forms of depression, but also aims at detailing how flaws in the conduct and reporting of antidepressant trials have led to an overestimation of benefits and underestimation of harms. The transformation of the diagnostic concept of depression from a rare but serious disorder to an over-inclusive, highly prevalent but predominantly mild and self-limiting disorder is central to the books argument. It maintains that biological reductionism in psychiatry and pharmaceutical marketing reframed depression as a brain disorder, corroborating the overemphasis on drug treatment in both research and practice. Finally, the author goes on to explore how pharmaceutical companies have distorted the scientific literature on the efficacy and safety of antidepressants and how patient advocacy groups, leading academics, and medical organisations with pervasive financial ties to the industry helped to promote systematically biased benefit-harm evaluations, affecting public attitudes towards antidepressants as well as medical education, training, and practice.

This book describes how malaria both frustrates and facilitates life for Indigenous Pa lawan communities living in the forested foothills of the municipality of Bataraza on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. Tracing the arc of malaria on the archipelago from colonial encounters to the present day, it examines the ways in which malaria parasites have become entangled in contemporary lives. It uniquely explores the experiences of local government leaders working towards sustainably developing this last ecological frontier, health workers trying to meet international targets to eliminate malaria, and Pa lawan people trying to keep their bodies, social relations and the cosmos in careful balance. In exquisite detail, Dr Dalia Iskander shows how malaria emerged from, and was intrinsic to, a whole host of strategically-orientated social practices that were enacted in as well as around the disease's name, as people worked day-to-day to gain power in different guises in different arenas.

This work focuses on the relationship between childhood socialization, masculinities, and young men's coming of age in contemporary Jamaica. The author elucidates social, cultural, and historical dimensions of young men's lifeworlds and theorizes on the potential trajectories of being emotionally well and/or un-well vis-a-vis gendered normative orders of growing up and relating to others within and beyond kinship and courtship relations. Based on fieldwork, this book elaborates on the extent to which social discourses of masculinity and men's personal experiences of their own and other men's mental health are reproduced in Jamaica. Faulhaber places her work in contemporary psychological and medical anthropology and aims to overcome the separation of psyche, body, and environment that is often common in psychotherapy, psychiatry, and health sciences. The author embarks on this important endeavour through critical and self-reflexive ethnography and the analysis of hegemonic narratives and discourses in media and popular culture. In juxtaposition and extension to other global mental health initiatives, this work highlights that well-being, affliction and suffering can barely be grasped scientifically as objectively measurable mental states of the individual.

The book outlines post-Soviet style of health management in Central Asia. Regional studies on Central Asia to date have focused on states, politics, religion and inter-ethnic relations but not on the health system within the region. Soviet-style policies have also covered only other aspects relevant for the region. This book highlights the public health situation of the region with a focus on drug abuse, HIV/AIDS in the context of increased mobility, and drug trafficking routes which became even more porous after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Based on a qualitative study, the empirical data in the book was collected during long-term fieldwork conducted in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in 2010-2011 as well as shorter stays in Uzbekistan between 2012-2016. The analysis of the empirical material largely draws on the works of Foucault, particularly his concept of biopolitics when analyzing Soviet-style health management that is still practiced in the region. Applying the Foucauldian genealogical method, this study has been structured to trace the genealogy of epidemics to understand the historical path of drug abuse in the region as well as the discursive genealogy of drug politics and drug abuse. Applying the same genealogical method of Foucault, the formative and discursive trajectory of the institution of Uchyot was traced to contextualize the health governance methods that have historical legacy of Soviet-style governance and control of the total population. Drugs and Public Health in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Soviet-Style Health Management is a unique resource for academic specialists, practitioners/professionals, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in public health, as well as a range of scholars and professionals in sociology, political science, anthropology, and anyone with an interest in the Central Asia region, drug addiction, or HIV. The book also could appeal to international donors in the field of HIV/drug addiction who are working in the region.

This book explores the ways in which socio-technical settings in medical contexts find varying articulations in a specific locale. Focusing on Japan, it consists of nine case studies on topics concerning: experiences with radiation in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima; patient security, end-of-life and high-tech medicine in hospitals; innovation and diffusion of medical technology; and the engineering and evaluating of novel devices in clinical trials. The individual chapters situate humans and devices in medical settings in their given semantic, pragmatic, institutional and historical context. A highly interdisciplinary approach offers deep insights beyond the manifold findings of each case study, thereby enriching academic discussions on socio-technical settings in medical contexts amongst affiliated disciplines. This volume will be of broad interest to scholars, practitioners, policy makers and students from various disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical humanities, social sciences, ethics and law, business and innovation studies, as well as biomedical engineering, medicine and public health.

This book tells the story of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and asks why, after more than three decades, it has not normalised. Despite considerable efforts to prevent infection, and ambitious targets set to end the epidemic by 2030, HIV infections are increasing among young women and treatment uptake and adherence have been uneven. Focusing on the years preceding and following treatment access, this book addresses why an end to AIDS may be misplaced optimism. By examining public discourses and private narratives about infection, illness and death, this work reveals the contradictions between the lived experiences of AIDS suffering on the one hand, and biomedical certainties on the other. Based on long-term ethnographic research in rural villages of the South African lowveld, and within HIV prevention interventions in South Africa more generally, this book offers an intimate perspective on the social and cultural responses to the epidemic.

In The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram, medical anthropologist Janelle S. Taylor analyzes the full sociocultural context of ultrasound technology and imagery. Drawing upon ethnographic research both within and beyond the medical setting, Taylor shows how ultrasound has entered into public consumer culture in the United States. The book documents and critically analyzes societal uses for ultrasound such as nondiagnostic ""keepsake"" ultrasound businesses that foster a new consumer market for these blurry, monochromatic images of eagerly awaited babies, and anti-abortion clinics that use ultrasound in an attempt to make women bond with the fetuses they carry, inciting a pro-life state of mind. This book offers much-needed critical awareness of the less easily recognized ways in which ultrasound technology is profoundly social and political in the United States today.

This book takes up the challenge of examining women's understandings of eating disorders and child sexual abuse away from a framework focused on pathology. The central argument is that women's distress is an enactment of their engagement with certain discourses and practices, rather than a reaction triggered by child sexual abuse. Guided by a contemporary feminist framework and Mikhail Bakhtin's sociological linguistics, to substantiate the argument, women's own poetry and drawings are used as evidence to develop, support and supplement research findings. The book establishes that an eating disorder is 'an understandable response' to sexual trauma and shifts the focus away from 'a damaged personality'. Even more importantly, it demonstrates that women with eating disorders are using their bodies as a form of resistance to express silenced traumas that remain in the silenced female body. This is an active way of making sense of experiences of child sexual abuse.

This volume reflects on how anthropologists have engaged in medical education and aims to positively influence the future careers of anthropologists who are currently engaged or are considering a career in medical education. The volume is essential for medical educators, administrators, researchers, and practitioners, those interested in the history of medicine, global health, sociology of health and illness, medical and applied anthropology. For over a century, anthropologists have served in many roles in medical education: teaching, curriculum development, administration, research, and planning. Recent changes in medical education focusing on diversity, social determinants of health, and more humanistic patient-centered care have opened the door for more anthropologists in medical schools. The chapter authors describe various ways in which anthropologists have engaged and are currently involved in training physicians, in various countries, as well as potential new directions in this field. They address critical topics such as: the history of anthropology in medical education; humanism, ethics, and the culture of medicine; interprofessional and collaborative clinical care; incorporating patient perspectives in practice; addressing social determinants of health, health disparities, and cultural competence; anthropological roles in planning and implementation of medical education programs; effective strategies for teaching medical students; comparative analysis of systems of care in Japan, Uganda, France, United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada and throughout the United States; and potential new directions for anthropological engagement with medicine. The volume overall emphasizes the important role of anthropology in educating physicians throughout the world to improve patient care and population health.

This book provides a solid basis to understand two centuries of bodily measurement practices and their scientific and political scope throughout the Western world. By exploring various cases, it proposes a new approach of measurement from an epistemological point of view and demonstrates the central role of the measurement of the body for political purposes. By studying categorizations of race, age and quality of life between the 19th and 20th century, the first part of the book highlights how human body measurements extend from the flesh to subjective experience. The second part shows how genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, humans and social subjects. The final part reveals how contemporary measurements of age, race and disease gave rise to new hierarchies between human beings and social groups. The book concludes by considering different styles of measuring the body and their ontological consequences.

Are you your genes? De-Sequencing: Identity Work with Genes explores this perplexing question, showing how different forms of knowledge must be contextualized to become meaningful. It is generally assumed that the genomic sequence adds up to the identity-forming material life is made of. Yet identity cannot itself adopt the form of a sequence. As the authors in this volume show, the genome must be 'de-sequenced' by human language to render it interpretable and meaningful in a social context. The book unpacks this type of 'sequence-speech' in engaging detail, adopting a personal, social, cultural, and bio-political approach to examine the transformation of human identity and reflexivity in the era of genetic citizenship.