Plague Doctors - Responding to the AIDS Epidemic in France and America

Plague Doctors highlights culturally based differences between French and American medicine, not only in health care delivery, but in the way each system constructs the interaction between disease and the human body. This work challenges the assumption that biomedicine is uniform across the western world. The author, a medical doctor and anthropologist, provides an ethnographic look into the daily experiences of physicians and researchers, examining how members of the French and American medical communities construct their models of AIDS through discourse and practice. The book is based on a comparative study of two AIDS clinics, one in Chicago and the other in Paris. Participant observation conducted at the clinics and interviews with physicians and researchers outside the sites yielded important insights into the world of AIDS medicine.

List of contents

Introduction
Theory, Method and Context
Cultural Construction--Choosing Among Stories
Surveying the Contextual Ground
Constructing AIDS
The Building Blocks of AIDS
The Stories of AIDS--Natural History and Staging
Treatment
Paradoxes and Patients' Stories
AIDS as Constructor
AIDS Bodies, AIDS Patients
Health Care and Medical Practice
Good Science, Bad Science
Identity and the AIDS Doctor
Medical Differences, Different Medicines
The French Are Different: French and American Medicine in the Context of AIDS
Conclusions
Appendix: Statistical Description of Informants
Glossary of Terms
Bibliography
Index

About the author

JAMIE L. FELDMAN has a doctorate in anthropology and is a resident physician in Family Practice at Lutheran General Hospital in Illinois. She has published on the Gallo-Montagnier dispute over HIV and is currently researching patient models of AIDS/HIV. Her other publications have examined biomedicine from a cross-cultural point of view.

Product details

• Authors: Jamie L. Feldman, Feldman Jamie L.
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: ages 7 to 17
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 18.10.1995
• EAN: 9780897893855
• ISBN: 978-0-89789-385-5
• No. of pages: 288
• Weight: 624 g
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; USA, Cultural Studies, MEDICAL / Public Health, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Disease & Health Issues, MEDICAL / Preventive Medicine, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, MEDICAL / AIDS & HIV, United States of America, USA, Public health & preventive medicine, Health, illness and addiction: social aspects, Public health and preventive medicine, Hiv / Aids: Social Aspects, HIV / AIDS, Medicine: HIV/AIDS, retroviral diseases, Health and Wellness: Diseases and Conditions