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.

This illuminating guide to the Native American ritual of the Medicine Wheel makes an ancient spiritual practice available to everyone. Roy Wilson, Cowlitz Chief and Spiritual Leader in Washington, combines Sun Bear's Zodiac (outer circle) and his own vision. The Four Pathways are used to experience the God within. It is important to note that all Pathways go through the Creator. which includes the Creator in the center, surrounded by seven Spirit Messengers: Cougar, Hawk, Coyote, Wolf, Bear, Raven, and Owl; the four Gatekeepers: Buffalo in the East, Bear in the South; Eagle in the West; and Cougar in the North; the twelve Spirit Helpers: Turkey, Turtle, and Owl on the East Pathway; Beaver, Ant, and Squirrel on the South Pathway; Butterfly, Bat, and Grouse on the West Pathway; and, Hawk, Goose, and Wolf on the North Pathway.

These original essays, which combine theoretical argument with empirical observation, constitute a state-of-the-art platform for future research in medical anthropology. Ranging in time and locale, the essays are based on research in historical and cultural settings. The contributors accept the notion that all knowledge is socially and culturally constructed and examine the contexts in which that knowledge is produced and practiced in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology, and anthropology. Professionals in behavioral medicine, public health, and epidemiology as well as medical anthropologists will find their insights significant.

Civilized nations popularly assume that "primitive" societies are poor, ill, and malnourished and that progress through civilization automatically implies improved health. In this provocative book, Mark Nathan Cohen challenges this belief. Using findings from epidemiology, anthropology, and archaeology, Cohen provides fascinating evidence about the actual effects of civilization on health, suggesting that some aspects of "progress" create as many health problems as they prevent or cure. "[This book] is certain to become a classic-a prominent and respected source on this subject for years into the future.... If you want to read something that will make you think, reflect, and reconsider, Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civilization is for you."-S. Boyd Eaton, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A major accomplishment. Cohen is a broad and original thinker who states his views in direct and accessible prose.... This is a book that should be read by everyone interested in disease, civilization, and the human condition."-David Courtwright, Journal of the History of Medicine "Cohen has done his homework extraordinarily well, and the coverage of the biomedical, nutritional, demographic, and ethnographic literature about foragers and low energy agriculturalists is excellent.... The book deserves a wide readership and a central place in our professional libraries. As a scholarly summary it is without parallel."-Henry Harpending, American Ethnologist "Deserves to be read by anthropologists concerned with health, medical personnel responsible for communities, and any medical anthropologists.... Indeed, it could provide great profit and entertainment to the general reader."-George T. Nurse, Current Anthropology

Like its classic predecessor, "Asian Medical Systems," "Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge" significantly expands the study of Asian medicine. These essays ask how patients and practitioners know what they know--what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the authors offer an exciting range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.

This is a lively and original book, which treats Western biomedical discourse about illness in Africa as a cultural system that constructed "the African" out of widely varying, and sometimes improbable, materials. Referring mainly to British dependencies in East and Central Africa in the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, it draws on diverse sources ranging from court records and medical journals to fund-raising posters and "jungle doctor" cartoons. Curing Their Ills brings refreshing concreteness and dynamism to the discussion of European attitudes toward their others, as it traces the shifts and variations in medical discourse on African illness. Among the topics the book covers are the differences between missionary medicine, which emphasized individual responsibility for sin and disease, and secular medicine, which tended toward an ethnic model of collective pathology; leprosy and the construction of the social role of "the leper"; and the struggle to define insanity in a context of great ignorance about what the "normal African" was like and a determination to crush indigenous beliefs about bewitchment. The underlying assumption of this discourse was that disease was produced by the disintegration and degeneration of "tribal" cultures, which was seen to be occurring in the process of individualization and modernization. This was a cultural rather than a materialist model, the argument being that Africans were made sick not by the material changes to their lives and environment, but by their cultural "maladaptation" to modern life. The "scientific" discourse about the biological inferiority of "the African," traced by one school of scientists to defects in the frontal lobe, makes painful reading today; it persisted into the 1950s.

"With finely crafted ethnography, Tsipy Ivry engages her readers in the most intimate of experiences-pregnancy. Research in Japan and Israel reveals how medical knowledge and technologies are made use of differentially in these two locations by both physicians and women to accomplish a remarkably dissimilar embodiment of future motherhood. Ivry's position is that concern about the ramifications of technologically assisted reproduction should not usurp representations of the cultures of pregnancy." -Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death "A fascinating double-ethnography of pregnancy in two cultures. This outstanding book reveals stunning cultural differences in the interpretation of the embodied experience of pregnancy. In spite of their mutual technological sophistication, Japanese and Israeli views on pregnancy could hardly be more different, nor could the biomedical advice that women in each culture receive. Ivry's work takes Brigitte Jordan's analysis of birth in four cultures to a new level, focusing specifically on the cultural influences that profoundly affect both women's and obstetricians' perceptions and management of pregnancy, and deeply demonstrating the influence of culture on biomedical 'science.'" -Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage With all of the burgeoning social interest in new reproductive technologies and in childbirth, why has pregnancy been forgotten? Isn't pregnancy just as culturally variant as other aspects of reproduction? Embodying Culture looks at pregnancy as much more than just "expecting." Tsipy Ivry juxtaposes pregnancy in two non-western postindustrial democracies, one preoccupied with military conflicts and existential threats (Israel), the other horrified by the graying of society and shrinking birth rates (Japan). Through ethnographic exploration of pregnancy experiences of Japanese and Israeli women and comparative study of ob-gyns and the bioemedical cultures that medicalize pregnancy in divergent ways, Ivry illuminates pregnancy as a meaningful cultural category for social analysis: a first step toward an anthropology of pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry is a lecturer in anthropology at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. A volume in the Studies in Medical Anthropology series, edited by Mac Marshall

In The White Plague, Rene and Jean Dubos argue that the great increase of tuberculosis was intimately connected with the rise of an industrial, urbanized society and--a much more controversial idea when this book first appeared forty years ago--that the progress of medical science had very little to do with the marked decline in tuberculosis in the twentieth century.The White Plague has long been regarded as a classic in the social and environmental history of disease. This reprint of the 1952 edition features new introductory writings by two distinguished practitioners of the sociology and history of medicine. David Mechanic's foreword describes the personal and intellectual experience that shaped Rene Dubos's view of tuberculosis. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz's historical introduction reexamines The White Plague in light of recent work on the social history of tuberculosis. Her thought-provoking essay pays particular attention to the broader cultural and medical assumptions about sickness and sick people that inform a society's approach to the conquest of disease.

In this widely-praised study, Carol Laderman provides a vivid picture of the daily life of rural Malays as she focuses on their dietary practices and the ritual and medical aspects of childbirth procedures. Apprenticed to a village midwife and a local shaman, she was able to observe a traditional culture adapting to modern practices.

An in-depth and wide-ranging approach to the study of older adults in society Taking a holistic approach to the study of aging, this volume uses biological, archaeological, medical, and cultural perspectives to explore how older adults have functioned in societies around the globe and throughout human history. As the world's population over 65 years of age continues to increase, this wide-ranging approach fills a growing need for both academics and service professionals in gerontology, geriatrics, and related fields. Case studies from the United States, Tibet, Turkey, China, Nigeria, and Mexico provide examples of the ways age-related changes are influenced by environmental, genetic, sociocultural, and political-economic variables. Taken together, they help explain how the experience of aging varies across time and space. These contributions from noted anthropological scholars examine evolutionary and biological understandings of human aging, the roles of elders in various societies, issues of gender and ageism, and the role of chronic illness and "successful aging" among older adults. This volume highlights how an anthropology of aging can illustrate how older adults adapt to shifting life circumstances and environments, including changes to the ways in which individuals and families care for them. The research in Anthropological Perspectives on Aging can also help researchers, students, and practitioners reach across disciplines to address age discrimination and help improve health outcomes throughout the life course.

This reader offers some of the most important writing to date from the science of COVID-19 and what science says about its spread and social implications. The readings have been carefully selected, introduced, and interpreted for an introductory or graduate student readership by a distinguished medical sociology and political science team. While some of the early science was inaccurate, lacking sufficient data, or otherwise incomplete, the author team has selected the most important and reliable early work for teachers and students in courses on medical sociology, public health, nursing, infectious diseases, epidemiology, anthropology of medicine, sociology of health and illness, social aspects of medicine, comparative health systems, health policy and management, health behaviors, and community health. Global in scope, the book tells the story of what happened and how COVID-19 was dealt with. Much of this material is in clinical journals, normally not considered in the social sciences, which are nonetheless informative and authoritative for student and faculty readers. Their selection and interpretation for students makes this concise reader an essential teaching source about COVID-19. An accompanying online resource on the book's Routledge web page will update and evolve by providing links to new readings as the science develops.

Western medicine—especially in contrast with non-Western traditions of medical practice—is widely thought of as a coherent and unified field in which beliefs, definitions, and judgments are shared. Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol debunk this myth with an interdisciplinary and intercultural collection of essays that reveals the significantly varied ways practitioners of “conventional” Western medicine handle bodies, study test results, configure statistics, and converse with patients . Combining theoretical work with interviews and direct observation of the activities and interactions of doctors, nurses, technicians, and patients, the contributors to this volume provide comparative studies of specific cases. Individual chapters explore topics such as the contested domain of fetal surgery in a California hospital, the construction of gender identity before transsexual surgery in Germany, and differences in the treatment and definition of pain by two clinics in France. Differences in Medicine advances earlier studies on medicine’s social diversity and regional variations to expose significant differences in the presumptions and decisions that affect patients’ lives, and marks a dramatic development in both the study of medicine and in science studies generally. Revealing the ways in which the bodies and lives of people are constructed as medical objects by practitioners, technologies, and textbooks, this collection calls for and initiates new, more textured investigations and theories of the body in medicine and the practice of science. It will open new discussions among medical and healthcare professionals as well as scholars in medical anthropology, science studies, sociology, philosophy, and the history of medicine. Contributors. Isabelle Baszanger, Marc Berg, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Monica J. Casper, Charis M. Cussins, Nicolas Dodier, Stefan Hirschauer, Annemarie Mol, Vicky Singleton, Susan Leigh Star, Stefan Timmermans, Dick Willems

Until now our knowledge of African health and healing has been extensive but fragmented. Here in eighteen essays is the first comprehensive account of disease, health,and healing practices in the African continent. The contributors all emphasize the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present. Several chapters illustrate how the most basic facts of everyday life encourage the spread of disease and chape the possibilities of survival. Other discuss a variety of healing practices: drums of affliction in Bantu-speaking societies, Muslim humoral medicine, and biomedicine as practiced in hospitals and dispensaries. The editors provide introductory overviews explaining why and how health and disease are related to historical, economic, and political phenomena.

What were the illnesses that plagued men, women, and children of the ancient world? Traditional approaches to this subject have often relied exclusively on literary evidence, but ancient texts are extraordinarily difficult to interpret. Different methodologies, archaic defitions of diseases, and technical terms whose meanings have shifted over time frustrate discovery of the actual diseases hidden behind textual sources. To uncover this "nosological reality," Mirko D. Grmek has fashioned a vast army of techniques into a new, multidisciplinary approach that combines philology, paleopathology, paleodemography, and iconography with recent developments in genetics, immunology, epidemiology, and clinical medicine. Also new is Grmek's concept of pathocoenosis (the ensemble of pathological states present in a given population) and his method of examining such ancient diseases as leprocy, tuberculosis, and syphilis in relation to one another, and to all other pathological conditions, rather than in isolation.

An in-depth and wide-ranging approach to the study of older adults in society Taking a holistic approach to the study of aging, this volume uses biological, archaeological, medical, and cultural perspectives to explore how older adults have functioned in societies around the globe and throughout human history. As the world's population over 65 years of age continues to increase, this wide-ranging approach fills a growing need for both academics and service professionals in gerontology, geriatrics, and related fields. Case studies from the United States, Tibet, Turkey, China, Nigeria, and Mexico provide examples of the ways age-related changes are influenced by environmental, genetic, sociocultural, and political-economic variables. Taken together, they help explain how the experience of aging varies across time and space. These contributions from noted anthropological scholars examine evolutionary and biological understandings of human aging, the roles of elders in various societies, issues of gender and ageism, and the role of chronic illness and "successful aging" among older adults. This volume highlights how an anthropology of aging can illustrate how older adults adapt to shifting life circumstances and environments, including changes to the ways in which individuals and families care for them. The research in Anthropological Perspectives on Aging can also help researchers, students, and practitioners reach across disciplines to address age discrimination and help improve health outcomes throughout the life course.

Sumud, meaning steadfastness in Arabic, is central to the issues of survival and resistance that are part of daily life for Palestinians. Although much has been written about the politics, leaders, and history of Palestine, less is known about how everyday working-class Palestinians exist day to day, negotiating military occupation and shifting social infrastructure. Wick's powerful ethnography opens a window onto the lives of Palestinians, exploring specifically the experience of giving birth. Drawing upon oral histories, Wick follows the stories of mothers, nurses, and midwives in villages and refugee camps. She maps the ways in which individuals narrate and experience birth, calling attention to the genre and form of these stories. Placing these oral histories in context, the book looks at the history of the infrastructure surrounding birth and medicine in Palestine, from large hospitals to village clinics, to private homes. As the medical landscape changed from centralized urban hospitals to decentralized independent caregivers, women increasingly carved a space for themselves in public discourse and employed the concept of sumud to relate their everyday struggles.

The Bushbuckridge region of South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. Having first arrived in the area in the early 1990s, the disease spread rapidly, and by 2008 life expectancies had fallen by 12 years for men and 14 years for women. Since 2005, public health facilities have increasingly offered free HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) treatment, offering a degree of hope, but uptake and adherence to the therapy has been sporadic and uneven. Drawing on his extensive ethnographic research, carried out in Bushbuckridge over the course of 25 years, Isak Niehaus reveals how the AIDS pandemic has been experienced at the village-level. Most significantly, he shows how local cultural practices and values have shaped responses to the epidemic. For example, while local attitudes towards death and misfortune have contributed to the stigma around AIDS, kinship structures have also facilitated the adoption and care of AIDS orphans. Such practices challenge us to rethink the role played by culture in understanding and treating sickness, with Niehaus showing how an appreciation of local beliefs and customs is essential to any effective strategy of AIDS treatment. Overturning many of our assumptions on disease prevention, the book is essential reading for practitioners as well as researchers in global health, anthropology, sociology, epidemiology and scholars interested in public health and administration in sub-Saharan Africa.

More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease-as a medical emergency-not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda. Rather than rely on a foreign-led model, physicians in Uganda responded to this failure by developing a novel public health program known as Mwanamugimu. The new approach prioritized local expertise and empowering Ugandan women, blending biomedical knowledge with African sensibilities and cultural competencies. In The Riddle of Malnutrition, Jennifer Tappan examines how over the course of half a century Mwanamugimu tackled the most fatal form of childhood malnutrition-kwashiorkor-and promoted nutritional health in the midst of postcolonial violence, political upheaval, and neoliberal resource constraints. She draws on a diverse array of sources to illuminate the interplay between colonialism, the production of scientific knowledge, and the delivery of health services in contemporary Africa.

Our bones can reveal fascinating information about how we have lived, from the food we have eaten to our levels of activity and the infections and injuries we have suffered. Elizabeth Weiss introduces readers to how lifestyle-in complex interaction with biology, genes, and environment-affects health in this distinctive tour of human osteology, past and present. Centering on health issues that have arisen in the last fifty to sixty years rather than thousands of years ago, Paleopathology in Perspective is organized around particular bone traits such as growth patterns, back pains, infections, and oral health. Each chapter explains one category of traits and reviews data drawn from both ancient and more contemporary populations to explore how global trait trends have changed over time. Weiss also considers the likely causes of these changes-for example, the growth of obesity, increased longevity, and greater intensity of childhood sports. Taking a long view of bones, as Weiss clearly demonstrates, provides clues not just about how ancient humans once lived, but also how biology and behavior, lifestyle and health, remain intrinsically linked.

"Deep China" investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China's profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.

Aging occurs at the level of individual cells, a complex interplay between intrinsic "programming" and exogenous "wear and tear," with genetically-determined cellular capacity to repair environmentally-induced DNA damage playing a central role in the rate of aging and its specific manifestations. In 12 chapters, "The Role of DNA Damage and Repair in Cell Aging" provides an intellectual framework for aging of mitotic and post-mitotic cells, describes a variety of model systems for further studies, and reviews current concepts of DNA responses and their relationship to the phenomenon of aging.

As part of a series entitled "Advances in Cell Aging and Gerontology," this volume also summarizes seminal recent discoveries such as the molecular basis for Werner syndrome (a mutant DNA helicase), the complementary roles of telomere shortening and telomerase activity in cell senescence versus immortalization, the role of apoptosis in the homeostasis of aging tissue, and the existence of an inducible SOS-like response in mammalian cells that minimizes DNA damage from repeatedly encountered injurious environmental agents. Insights into the relationship between cellular aging and age-associated diseases, particularly malignancies, are also provided in several chapters.

This book is an excellent single source of information for anyone interested in DNA repair, mechanisms of aging, or certainly their intersection. Students will gain a general appreciation of these fields, but even the most senior investigators will benefit from the detailed coverage of rapidly advancing areas.

How are we to read and understand stories of Jesus healing the lame, deaf, blind, and those with a variety of other maladies? Pilch takes us beyond the historical and literary questions to examine the social questions of how the earliest followers of Jesus and ancient Judeans understood healing, what roles healers played, and the different emphases on healing among the gospels. In his comparative analysis, the author draws on the anthropology of the Mediterranean as well as the models employed by medical anthropologists to understand peasant societies and their health-care systems.Utilizes social-science modelsFeatures a complementary web- site with additional resources