Medical practitioners and the ordinary citizen are becoming more aware that we need to understand cultural variation in medical belief and practice. The more we know how health and disease are managed in different cultures, the more we can recognize what is "culture bound" in our own medical belief and practice.

The Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology is unique because it is the first reference work to describe the cultural practices relevant to health in the world's cultures and to provide an overview of important topics in medical anthropology. No other single reference work comes close to marching the depth and breadth of information on the varying cultural background of health and illness around the world. More than 100 experts - anthropologists and other social scientists - have contributed their firsthand experience of medical cultures from around the world.

Like its predecessor "Asian Medical Systems, Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge" expands the study of Asian medecine. 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 a range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.;The contributors are Judith Farquhar, Byron Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good; Shigehisa Kuriyama, Carol Laderman, Charles Leslie, Margaret Lock, Mark Nichter, Gananath Obeysekere, Gary Seaman, Margaret Trawick, Paul U. Unschuld and Francis Zimmerman.

"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.

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.

Whereas most previous work on Maya healing has focused on ritual and symbolism, this book presents evidence that confirms the scientific foundations of traditional Maya medicine. Data drawn from analysis of the medical practices of two Mayan-speaking peoples, the Tzeltal and Tzotzil, reveal that they have developed a large number of herbal remedies based on a highly sophisticated understanding of the physiology and symptomatology of common diseases and on an in-depth knowledge of medicinal plants. Here Elois Ann Berlin and Brent Berlin, along with their many collaborators, provide detailed information on Maya disease classification, symptomatology, and treatment of the most significant health conditions affecting the Highland Maya, the gastrointestinal diseases. The authors base their work on broad-ranging comparative ethno-medical and ethnobotanical data collected over seven years of original field research. In describing the Mayas' understanding and treatment of gastrointestinal diseases, Berlin and Berlin show that the plants used as remedies are condition specific.> Moreover, laboratory studies demonstrate that the most commonly agreed upon herbal remedies are potentially effective against the pathogenic agents underlying specific diseases and that they strongly affect the physiological processes associated with intestinal peristalsis. These findings suggest that the traditional Maya medical system is the result of long-term explicit empirical experimentation with the effects of herbal remedies on bodily function. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.