This revised edition of this significant text in medical anthropology contains additional material on subjects as diverse as aging, creativity, and ideology. It is both an introduction to the growing field of medical anthropology and a reference work, providing 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. Additional 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 the ways in which doctors, healers and patients experience illness and influence the matrix of decision making.
This book is useful for students and professionals in anthropology, medicine and all social science.