Medical Anthropology

Taken from Preface: In "Medial Anthropology" we discuss a number of themes that have attracted biological and social anthropologists as they have turned their attention to matters of health and illness during the past generation. A comprehensive treatment of all the work that has been done is not our objective; even if this achievement would be possible, which we doubt, it would make for dull reading. Instead, we have contented ourselves with a general overview of the field of medical anthropology as we see it, concentrating on the topics that we know firsthand from research, consulting activities, and teaching, and that we have found to be of interest to our students. Although--as the reader will note-we neither ignore nor underestimate the importance of the more purely biological side of medical anthropology, the sociocultral orientation of most of the chapters that follow make clear that the debt we owe to our sister discipline, medical sociology.