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.

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 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 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.

COVID-19: Proportionality, Public Policy and Social Distance explores the social and political response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It details the sociological aspects of the spread of the virus, the role played by social distancing in virus mitigation, and the comparative effect of social proximity and distance on national anti-viral behavior. Peter Murphy discusses various public policy approaches to the pandemic and their successes and failures. In this engaging analysis, he investigates the way that contemporary societies think about risk, threat and harm, and how social mood affected the response to COVID-19.

This book takes an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and transnational approach, presenting work that will provide the reader with a nuanced and in-depth understanding of the role of globalization in the sexual and reproductive lives of gendered bodies in the 21st century. Reproductive Justice and Sexual Rights: Transnational Perspectives draws on reproductive justice and transnational feminism as frameworks to explore and make sense of the reproductive and sexual experiences of various groups of women and marginalized people around the world. Interactions between globalization, feminism, reproductive justice, and sexual rights are explored within human rights and transnational feminist paradigms. This book includes case studies from Mexico, Ireland, Uganda, Colombia, Taiwan, and the United States. The edited collection presented here is intended to provide academics and students with a challenging and thought-provoking look into sexual and reproductive health matters from across the globe. In this way, the work presented in this volume will help the reader understand their own reproductive and sexual experiences in a more nuanced and contextualized way that links individuals and communities to each other in a quest for justice and liberation.

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.

A narrative ethnography about a Ugandan woman and her relatives, this novelistic, fine-grained volume shows how global questions of responsibility and inequity travel in family networks and confront people with decisions about life and death. It is a story of existence under extremely challenging conditions, about belonging and marginalization, about the opacity and ambiguity of social relations, and about growing up in a country haunted by violence and civil war only to be later lifted by optimism and devastated anew by the AIDS epidemic. The story draws on long-term fieldwork and letters from the woman who takes centre stage in the story, while at once providing unique and privileged insight into the ethical challenges of a research method that demands personal involvement that is ultimately withdrawn for scholarly analysis.

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.

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 examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any 'user' agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Oudshoorn offers a fascinating examination of what it takes to become a resilient cyborg, and in the process develops a valuable new sociology of creating 'resilient' cyborgs.

This book provides an ethnographic account of the ways in which biomedicine, as a part of the modernization of healthcare, has been localized and established as the culturally dominant medical system in rural Bangladesh. Dr Faruk Shah offers an anthropological critique of biomedicine in rural Bangladesh that explains how the existing social inequalities and disparities in healthcare are intensified by the practices undertaken in biomedical health centres through the healthcare bureaucracy and local gendered politics. This work of villagers' healthcare practices leads to a fascinating analysis of the local healthcare bureaucracy, corruption, structural violence, commodification of health, pharmaceutical promotional strategies and gender discrimination in population control. Shah argues that biomedicine has already achieved cultural authority and acceptability at almost all levels of the health sector in Bangladesh. However, in this system healthcare bureaucracy is shaped by social capital, power relations and kin networks, and corruption is a central element of daily care practices.

Recent work in the mobilities literature has highlighted the importance of thinking about mobility and immobility as a continuum, where movement intersects with processes that might entail episodes of transition, waiting, emptiness, and fixity. This focus on stillness, things that are stuck, incomplete or in a state of transition can point to new theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions in social studies of medicine. This edited volume brings the concept of immobility to the forefront of social studies of medicine to explore how immobility shapes processes of medical care and the theoretical and methodological challenges of studying immobility in medical contexts. The authors in this volume draw from a wide range of case studies across the globe to make contributions to our current understanding of health, illness and medicine, mobilities and immobilities. Chapter 2 "Lists in Flux, Lives on Hold? Technologies of Waiting in Liver Transplant Medicine" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book investigates the ways in which context shapes how cognitive challenges and strengths are navigated and how these actions impact the self-esteem of individuals with dementia and their conversational partners. The author examines both the language used and face maintenance in everyday social interaction through the lens of epistemic discourse analysis. In doing so, this work reveals how changes in cognition may impact the faces of these individuals, leading some to feel ashamed, anxious, or angry, others to feel patronized, infantilized, or overly dependent, and still others to feel threatened in both ways. It further examines how discursive choices made by healthy interactional partners can minimize or exacerbate these feelings. This path-breaking work will provide important insights for students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, medical anthropology, and health communication.

This book is an attempt to understand suicide from the perspective of a group of men who decided to take their own lives. Their stories imply that male suicide is not, as frequently portrayed, an impulsive action arising from particular, sex-specific, causes but relates to a cluster of interlinked issues which accumulate over time. These issues were not distinctively male concerns but were connected to gender in that the men's difficulties were exacerbated by the existence of an emotional culture which inhibited males from expressing specific feelings. The prevailing form of masculinity impeded them in developing knowledge of, and speaking about, their emotional needs and from accessing help and this prolonged their suffering and made suicide a possibility. These men produced compelling accounts of their emotional pain which belied notions of male inexpressiveness but the findings point to a link between emotionally constraining cultures and suicidal behaviour for some groups of men.

This book paints a comprehensive portrait of Mexico's system of assisted reproduction first from a historical perspective, then from a more contemporary viewpoint. Based on a detailed analysis of books and articles published between the 1950s and 1980s, the first section tells the story of how the epistemic, normative, and material infrastructure of the assisted reproduction system was built. It traces the professionalization process of assisted reproduction as a medical field and the establishment of its professional association. Drawing on ethnographic material, the second part looks at how this system developed and flourished from the 1980s up to 2010, its commercialization process, how the expansion of reproductive services took place, and the messages regarding reproductive technologies that circulated within a wide discursive landscape. Given its scope and methods, this book will appeal to scholars interested in science and technology studies, reproduction studies, history of medicine, medical anthropology, and sociology.

Beautyscapes explores the global phenomenon of international medical travel, focusing on patient-consumers seeking cosmetic surgery outside their home country and on those who enable them to access treatment abroad, including surgeons and facilitators. It documents the journeys of those who travel for treatment abroad, as well as the nature and power relations of the IMT industry. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Beautyscapes draws on key themes of interest to students and researchers interested in globalisation and mobility to explain the nature and growing popularity of cosmetic surgery tourism. Richly illustrated with ethnographic material and with the voices of those directly involved in cosmetic surgery tourism, Beautyscapes explores cosmetic surgery journeys from Australia and China to East-Asia and from the UK to Europe and North Africa. -- .

This book addresses how skeletons can inform us about behavior by describing skeletal lesions in the Gombe chimpanzees, relating them to known life histories whenever possible, and analyzing demographic patterns in the sample. This is of particular interest to both primatologists and skeletal analysts who have benefited from published data on a smaller, earlier skeletal sample from Gombe. The Gombe skeletal collection is the largest collection of wild chimpanzees with known life histories in existence, and this work significantly expands the skeletal sample from this long-term research site (49 chimpanzees). The book explores topics of general interest to skeletal analysts such as demographic patterns, which injuries leave signs on the skeleton, and rates of healing, and discusses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the patterning of lesions. The book presents the data in a narrative style similar to that employed in Dr. Goodall's seminal work The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Readers already familiar with the Gombe chimpanzees are likely to appreciate summaries of life events correlated to observable skeletal features. The book is especially relevant at this time to remind primate conservationists of the importance of the isolated chimpanzee population at Gombe National Park as well as the availability of the skeletons for study, both within the park itself as well as at the University of Minnesota.

This book takes a historical and anthropological approach to understanding how non-human hosts and vectors of diseases are understood, at a time when emerging infectious diseases are one of the central concerns of global health. The volume critically examines the ways in which animals have come to be framed as 'epidemic villains' since the turn of the nineteenth century. Providing epistemological and social histories of non-human epidemic blame, as well as ethnographic perspectives on its recent manifestations, the essays explore this cornerstone of modern epidemiology and public health alongside its continuing importance in today's world. Covering diverse regions, the book argues that framing animals as spreaders and reservoirs of infectious diseases - from plague to rabies to Ebola - is an integral aspect not only to scientific breakthroughs but also to the ideological and biopolitical apparatus of modern medicine. As the first book to consider the impact of the image of non-human disease hosts and vectors on medicine and public health, it offers a major contribution to our understanding of human-animal interaction under the shadow of global epidemic threat.

Unpacking assumptions about corseting, Rebecca Gibson supplements narratives of corseted women from the 18th and 19th centuries with her seminal work on corset-related skeletal deformation. An undergarment that provided support and shape for centuries, the corset occupies a familiar but exotic space in modern consciousness, created by two sometimes contradictory narrative arcs: the texts that women wrote regarding their own corseting experiences and the recorded opinions of the medical community during the 19th century. Combining these texts with skeletal age data and rib and vertebrae measurements from remains at St. Bride's parish London dating from 1700 to 1900, the author discusses corseting in terms of health and longevity, situates corseting as an everyday practice that crossed urban socio-economic boundaries, and attests to the practice as part of normal female life during the time period Gibson's bioarchaeology of binding is is the first large-scalar, multi-site bioethnography of the corseted woman.

The Hadza, an ethnic group indigenous to northern Tanzania, are one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer populations. Archaeology shows 130,000 years of hunting and gathering in their land but Hadza are rapidly losing areas vital to their way of life. This book offers a unique opportunity to capture a disappearing lifestyle. Blurton Jones interweaves data from ecology, demography and evolutionary ecology to present a comprehensive analysis of the Hadza foragers. Discussion centres on expansion of the adaptationist perspective beyond topics customarily studied in human behavioural ecology, to interpret a wider range of anthropological concepts. Analysing behavioural aspects, with a specific focus on relationships and their wider impact on the population, this book reports the demographic consequences of different patterns of marriage and the availability of helpers such as husbands, children, and grandmothers. Essential for researchers and graduate students alike, this book will challenge preconceptions of human sociobiology.

The lives of kings, poets, authors, criminals and celebrities are a perpetual fascination in the media and popular culture, and for decades anthropologists and other scientists have participated in 'post-mortem dissections' of the lives of historical figures. In this field of biohistory, researchers have identified and analyzed these figures' bodies using technologies such as DNA fingerprinting, biochemical assays, and skeletal biology. This book brings together biohistorical case studies for the first time, and considers the role of the anthropologist in the writing of historical narratives surrounding the deceased. Contributors theorize biohistory with respect to the sociology of the body, examining the ethical implications of biohistorical work and the diversity of social theoretical perspectives that researchers' work may relate to. The volume defines scales of biohistorical engagement, providing readers with a critical sense of scale and the different paths to 'historical notoriety' that can emerge with respect to human remains.

This book describes community ophthalmology professionals in South Asia who demonstrate social entrepreneurship in global health to help the rural poor. Their innovations contested economic and scientific norms, and spread from India and Nepal outwards to other countries in Africa and Asia, as well as the United States, Australia, and Finland. This feminist postcolonial global ethnography illustrates how these innovations have resulted in dual socio-technical systems to solve the problem of avoidable blindness. Policymakers and activists might use this example of how to avoid Schumacher's critique of low labor, large scale and implement Gandhi's philosophy of good for all.

The popularization of the Internet, due in larger part to the advent of multifunctional cell phones, poses new challenges for health professionals, patients, and caregivers as well as creates new possibilities for all of us. This comprehensive volume analyzes how this social phenomenon is transforming long-established healthcare practices and perceptions in a country with one of the highest numbers of Internet users: Brazil. After an opening text that analyzes the Internet and E-Health Care as a field of study, the book comprises six parts. The first part introduces the emergence and development of the internet in Brazil, its pioneering experience in internet governance, digital inclusion, and online citizen participation. The second part is dedicated to internet health audiences by analyzing the cases of patients, the young, and the elderly seeking and sharing health information online, especially in virtual communities. The third part is dedicated to the challenges that the expansion of the internet in healthcare poses to all of us, such as the evaluation of the quality of health information available online and the prevention of the risks involved with online sales, cyberbullying, and consumption of prescription medicines. The fourth presents some innovative e-learning experiences carried out with different groups in Brazil, while the fifth part analyses some practical applications involving the Internet and health, including studies on M-Health, the Internet of things, serious games and the use of new information and communication technologies in health promotion. The last chapter analyses the future of healthcare in the Internet Age. The authors establish a critical and creative debate with international scholarship on the subject. This book is written in a direct and comprehensible way for professionals, researchers, students of communication and health, as well as for stakeholders and others interested in better understanding the trends and the different challenges related to the social phenomenon of the internet in health.