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.

This book examines various aspects of ethnomedicine and tribal healing practices, including its importance for inclusion and integration from a health systems perspective. Tribal healing practices is an under-studied component in healthcare system, health policy and health systems research. The book consists of original research papers based on empirical studies done by anthropologists, sociologists, public health practitioners and research scientists in various parts of India. It discusses issues of non-codified folk healing, with a focus on the therapeutic ideas and practices of tribal communities, located in anthropological theory and methods. It has a balance of empirical papers, review and theoretical papers, not only explaining 'what is inside the healing practices' but also touching upon the question of 'why' and delving into 'what should be' looking into the possibility to apply it for a larger good i.e., health care for all. This book discusses several important issues related to legitimacy, evidence and efficacy, recognition, certification and integration, protection and preservation, bio-piracy and bioprospecting, benefit sharing and intellectual property rights, sustainable use of medicinal herbs and conservation of nature and natural resources, biodiversity and possibilities of mainstreaming tribal healing. It is of interest to students and researchers from medical anthropology, medical sociology, cultural geography, liberal studies, tribal studies, ecology, sustainability and development and public health.

AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness. Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.

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.

There have been many books, movies, and even TV commercials featuring Neandertals--some serious, some comical. But what was it really like to be a Neandertal? How were their lives similar to or different from ours?
In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge team up to provide a brilliant account of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on the most recent fossil and archaeological remains. Indeed, some Neandertal remains are not fossilized, allowing scientists to recover samples of their genes--one specimen had the gene for red hair and, more provocatively, all had a gene called FOXP2, which is thought to be related to speech. Given the differences between their faces and ours, their voices probably sounded a bit different, and the range of consonants and vowels they could generate might have been different. But they could talk, and they had a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary--words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. Extensive archaeological remains of stone tools and living sites (and, yes, they did often live in caves) indicate that Neandertals relied on complex technical procedures and spent most of their lives in small family groups. The authors sift the evidence that Neandertals had a symbolic culture--looking at their treatment of corpses, the use of fire, and possible body coloring--and conclude that they probably did not have a sense of the supernatural. The book explores the brutal nature of their lives, especially in northwestern Europe, where men and women with spears hunted together for mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. They were pain tolerant, very likely taciturn, and not easy to excite.
Wynn and Coolidge offer here an eye-opening portrait of Neandertals, painting a remarkable picture of these long-vanished people and providing insight, as they go along, into our own minds and culture.

Medical anthropologists, medical sociologists and health educationalists have assumed that 'systems of medical knowledge' held by indigenous peoples and by Westerners alike are generally uniform and consistent. Over the last few years it has become evident that this is not so: frequently members of social groups, and their healers, do not have a clearly established rationale for health beliefs and medical practices. This book collects together some recent works in medical anthropology which argues that there are limits to local health-related knowledge, whether in the mind of the informants themselves or in the analytical models of the anthropologist.

"Attached Files" is a selection of lectures and papers written by Imre Lazar, a medical anthropologist with twenty-five years of experience, situated at the crossroads and frontiers of several disciplines, including anthropology, health sciences, religious studies, human ecology, and environmental ethics. The shared focus, connecting these borderlands into a common semantic network, is the problem of the synergic logic of human bonds and attachment embodied by somatic, social, institutional and symbolic structures. The first part of the book deals with pluralism and the enculturation of the medical practice and its anthropological perspectives. The concept of attachment, metaphorized by the title, also provides a common ground to envisage cultural history, philosophy, literature, and biomedical sciences in terms of synergic human agency and its obstacles. The book integrates various strands of anthropology, such as the evolutionary and the symbolic, and the materialist and the idealist. The book will be useful for those interested in the fields of medical anthropology, health psychology, religious studies, human ecology, ecophilosophy, and environmental ethics.