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After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word)
collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist,
will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his
taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of
medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical
leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic,
problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself
to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social,
non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those
matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out,
come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing
errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis course about
mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among
biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on
problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base
than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of
illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly
pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the
chapters that follow."
After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word)
collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist,
will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his
taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of
medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical
leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic,
problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself
to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social,
non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those
matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out,
come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing
errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis course about
mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among
biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on
problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base
than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of
illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly
pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the
chapters that follow."
Many serious public health problems confront the world in the new
millennium. Anthropology and Public Health examines the critical
role of anthropology in four crucial public health domains: (1)
anthropological understandings of public health problems such as
malaria, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes; (2) anthropological design of
public health interventions in areas such as tobacco control and
elder care; (3) anthropological evaluations of public health
initiatives such as Safe Motherhood and polio eradication; and (4)
anthropological critiques of public health policies, including
neoliberal health care reforms. As the volume demonstrates,
anthropologists provide crucial understandings of public health
problems from the perspectives of the populations in which the
problems occur. On the basis of such understandings,
anthropologists may develop and implement interventions to address
particular public health problems, often working in collaboration
with local participants. Anthropologists also work as evaluators,
examining the activities of public health institutions and the
successes and failures of public health programs. Anthropological
critiques may focus on major international public health agencies
and their workings, as well as public health responses to the
threats of infectious disease and other disasters. Through
twenty-four compelling case studies from around the world, the
volume provides a powerful argument for the imperative of
anthropological perspectives, methods, information, and
collaboration in the understanding and practice of public health.
Written in plain English, with significant attention to
anthropological methodology, the book should be required reading
for public health practitioners, medical anthropologists, and
health policy makers. It should also be of interest to those in the
behavioral and allied health sciences, as well as programs of
public health administration, planning, and management. As the
single most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of anthropology's
role in public health, this volume will inform debates about how to
solve the world's most pressing public health problems at a
critical moment in human history.
The ways in which people respond to sickness differ greatly from
society to society. In this book anthropologist and epidemiologist
Robert A. Hahn examines how Western and non-Western cultures
influence the definition, experience, and treatment of sickness.
Hahn begins by developing a definition of sickness that is based on
the patient's perception of suffering and disturbance rather than
on the physician's assessment of biomedical signs. After reviewing
the principal theories that account for the forms of sickness and
healing found in different historical and cultural situations, he
explores the relevance of both anthropological and epidemiological
approaches to sickness, focusing on the persistent gap between
white and black infant mortality in the United States. Hahn then
describes contemporary Western medicine as it might be seen by a
visiting foreign anthropologist. He delineates the culture of
Western medicine and portrays the world of one physician at work,
traces the evolution of obstetrics since 1903 by analyzing the
principal textbook-Williams Obstetrics-through its first eighteen
editions, and explores the gulf between physicians and their
patients by examining the accounts of physicians who have written
about their own illnesses. He concludes by proposing ways in which
some of the ills of contemporary Western medicine might be remedied
by applying anthropological principles to medical training and
practice.
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