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This long-awaited revision of what has now become the classic text in medical anthropology contains a wealth of new material on subjects as diverse as aging, creativity, and ideology. Originally cited in ^IAmerican Anthropologist^R as must reading for all medical anthropologists, physicians, advanced medical anthropology students and advanced medical students, this new edition should prove twice as valuable. It is both a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly growing field of medical anthropology and a state-of-the-art reference work. The authors bring new perspectives to our understanding of both Western and non-Western medicine, from the biochemical and physiological aspects of health care in preindustrialized cultures to cultural and ideological factors inherent in past and present Western medical care. New chapters focus on ethnobotany, placebo and pain, shamanism, and psychiatry.
The contributors to this volume examine the acculturation process of healer, physician, and patient in diverse cultural settings. They explore the social and cultural context of medical events as well as the process of medical thought and problem solving. Medicine, they illustrate, embraces or is embraced by both the cultural and biological dimensions of mankind. From this perspective they show how human belief, knowledge, and action structure the experience of disease and affect ways in which doctors, healers, and patients experience illness and influence the matrix of decision making. This book is essential for students and professionals in anthropology, medicine, and all social science.
List of contents
Preface: The Cultural Context of Medicine and the Biohuman Paradigm
Medical Systems and the Uses of ChoiceCreativity in Illness: Methodological Linkages to the Logic and Language of Science in Folk Pursuit of Health in Central Italy by Lola Romanucci-Ross
Aztec and European Medicine in the New World, 1521-1600 by Clara Sue Kidwell
Phantoms and Physicians: Social Change Through Medical Pluralism by Libbet Crandon-Malamud
Empirical Analyses of Non-Western Medical Practices and Medical EcologyPoisoned Apples and Honeysuckles: The Medicinal Plants of Native America by Daniel E. Moerman
Herbal and Symbolic Forms of Treatment in the Medicine of The Lowland Mixe by Michael Heinrich
The Evolution of Human Nutrition by Barry Bogin
Zoonoses and the Origins of Old and New World Viral Diseases--New Perspectives by Linda M. Van Blerkom
Malaria, Medicine, and Meals: A Biobehavioral Perspective by Nina L. Etkin and Paul J. Ross
Embodied Mind; Metaphors of Pain, Placebo, and Symbolic HealingThe Impassioned Knowledge of the Shaman by Lola Romanucci-Ross
Anarchy, Abjection, and Absurdity: A Case of Metaphoric Medicine among the Tabwa of Zaire by Allen F. Roberts
Physiology and Symbols: The Anthropological Implications of the Placebo Effect by Daniel E. Moerman
Narratives of Chronic Pain by Robert Kugelmann
The Effect of Ethnicity on Prescriptions for Patient Controlled Analgesia for Post Operative Pain by Bernardo Ng, Joel E. Dimsdale, Jens D. Rollnik, and Harvey Shapiro
Modern Medical Inquiry and Culture ChangeStress and Its Management: The Cultural Construction of an Illness and Its Treatment by Robert Kugelmann
Science of Mind in Contexts of a Culture by Laurence R. Tancredi
The "New Psychiatry": From Ideology to Cultural Error by Lola Romanucci-Ross
The Aging: Legal and Ethcial Personhood in Cultural Change by Laurence R. Tancredi and Lola Romanucci-Ross
The Extraneous Factor in Western Medicine by Lola Romanucci-Ross and Daniel E. Moerman
"Medical Anthropology": Convergence of Mind and Experience in the Anthropological Imagination by Lola Romanucci-Ross, Daniel E. Moerman, and Laurence R. Tancredi
Index
About the author
LOLA ROMANUCCI-ROSS is professor of Community and Family Medicine and Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She is author/editor of several books, including Mead's Other Manus (Bergin & Garvey, 1985) and The Anthropology of Medicine (Praeger Publishers, 1982).
