In the course of the study of medicine from an anthropological perspective, there are several themes which are repeatedly encountered. These include the body and its representation, meaning and a person’s response to that meaning, and finally, the symbolic images which construct and shape both meaning and the bodily representation. Each of these themes are addressed throughout medical anthropological texts, and are connected to and build on each other in a variety of ways.
The body is the site of medicine, because the body is the site of all cultural practices. As Byron Good states, “medicine formulates the human body and disease in a culturally distinctive fashion”. (Good, 65) It is the cultural fashion of western medicine to objectify the body by constructing it in purely biochemical and molecular terms. As Shiehisa Kuriyama shows us in his work, this is the result of the historical development of Greek medicine and its intersection with the western scientific sentiment. Kuriyama says, “conceptions of the body owe as much to particular uses of the senses as to particular ‘ways of thinking.’” (Kuriyama, 12) He goes on to explain how a tradition of empiricism and a belief that “only [literal speech] can insure limpid understanding; [figurative speech] is profoundly unreliable” (Kuriyama, 75), informed the development of the western medical culture.
With the obsession with clear and unambiguous language came a set of presuppositions, which, among other things, created a hierarchy of bodily representation. Kuriyama describes this in terms of western obsessions with musculature or the Chinese emphasis on how the skin looks. When the West undertook its various imperialistic projects across the globe this hierarchy of the...
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...sm for a lack of modernity. Villagers were keenly aware of what the shaman meant not only to their own culture, but also what it meant to those in the transnational space, and their conception changes because of this.
Thus we see how medical anthropology studies and provides analysis on the issues of the body, bodily perception, and the representation of the body, as well as meaning and symbolism. Also we see how medical anthropology takes these interpretations and uses them to critique the system’s practices. The biomedical system largely ignores the social aspects of illness, and this does a disservice to the suffering individual it seeks to restore. It emphasizes a biological reductionism which limits the care it can bring to the person it reconstructs as a patient, and in doing so, it discounts the multiple meanings medical symbols can hold for the patient.
The main characters, the Hmongs, are a culture of refugee families that supported CIA efforts in Laos. Their culture embeds deep spirituality into its health care, by the doctors of the Merced County hospital. The notion that herbs were strictly to heal the spirit was of course a source of contention for the physicians of the hospital, though nurses might feel that the symbolic effect alone is worth seizing. In other words, whether the physicians ...
In the novel, “The spirit catches you and you fall down”, Anne Fadiman was brilliantly able to capture how communication between other cultures takes place in the medical community. She writes about the experience of a Hmong family, the Lee’s, to portray the dissimilarities between two distinct cultures, Hmong and American. Throughout the novel she takes us on a rollercoaster of a journey as problems arise due to many barriers that naturally occur when collaborating two very divergent ways of life. Unfortunately the journey she takes us on does not come with a happy ending as we all expect. the edifying friction between the young girl’s parents and her doctors caused her to wasted away because of medical conditions, epilepsy and septic shock, which could have been treatable. Nevertheless, although Fadiman’s book depicts an unambiguous state of affairs, it is an eye opener to the nuisance of cultural conflict that can be practical to all circumstances and can be utilized by all nurses to provide cultural competent care.
Twenty four centuries ago, Hippocrates created the profession of medicine, for the first time in human history separating and refining the art of healing from primitive superstitions and religious rituals. His famous Oath forged medicine into what the Greeks called a technik, a craft requiring the entire person of the craftsman, an art that, according to Socrates in his dialogue Gorgias, involved virtue in the soul and spirit as well as the hands and brain. Yet Hippocrates made medicine more than a craft; he infused it with an intrinsic moral quality, creating a “union of medical skill and the integrity of the person [physician]” (Cameron, 2001).
As the quintessential Medical Anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Aids and Accusation is the typical representative of the interpretivist approach which studies health systems as systems of meaning. So, this works under the belief that people make their own choices and are not connected to laws of science or nature. The research in this field tends to be done from an objective point of view, greater detail, and looks at culture and how people live their lives, therefore obtaining high validity because it is a true representation and is trustworthy.
The Gross Clinic, or, The Clinic of Dr. Gross, is an 1875 painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. The medium is oil on canvas and the piece measures 8 feet by 6.5 feet. The picture captures Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lecturing a group of Jefferson Medical College students. The atmosphere of the piece is dark and disturbing, yet in a very philosophical manner. A surgery is being performed by several practitioners all at one time. The body that lies upon the operating table is indistinguishable; it is impossible to tell both the gender of the patient and what part of the body the surgery is being performed on. But it is also this ambiguity that captures one’s attention. The body lies
This chapter will analyze the Hippocratic medicine using especially the study of the Hippocratic Corpus. In the texts of the Hippocratic Corpus, medicine becomes pragmatic and secular, with theories to explain natural causes of diseases and discussions about medical practices and professional ethic. The chapter will discuss fundamental theoretical and ethical changes in medicine after Hippocrates.
1. The body of chronically ill person is a nexus of living meanings made manifest by the patients articulations of pain and health, of sufferings and joy.
Through showing the different definitions of health, the authors explain how those different understandings affect patterns of behavior on health depend on different cultures. In addition, an analysis of the models of health demonstrates even western medical approaches to health have different cognitions, same as the Indigenous health beliefs. The most remarkable aspect is a balance, a corresponding core element in most cultures which is an important consideration in Indigenous health as well. From an Indigenous perspective, health is considered as being linked, and keeping the connection is a priority to preserve their health. Consequently, health is a very much culturally determined. Health practitioners should anticipate and respect the cultural differences when they encounter a patient from various cultures. In particular, this article is good to understand why the Indigenous health beliefs are not that different than western medicine views using appropriate examples and comparative composition, even though the implementation the authors indicated is a bit abstract, not
Kleinman, Arthur M. “What Kind of Model for the Anthropology of Medical Systems?” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Sep, 1978), pp. 661-665.
In the US., the therapeutic group seldom has approaches to correspond with individuals of societies so drastically unique in relation to standard American society; even a great interpreter will think that it troublesome deciphering ideas between the two separate societies' reality ideas. American specialists, not at all like Hmong shamans, regularly physically touch and cut into the collections of their patients and utilize an assortment of capable medications and meds.
Kleinman, A. 1980. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry. University of California Press.
Robert Desjarlais, A Reader in Medical Anthropology Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) 160.
In the book The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down, ethnocentrism can also be seen. Throughout the book the family and the doctors have different ideas of medicine/healing techniques are often disagreed on. It’s important for the doctor to see that biomedicine has its own intentions of saving patient through standard procedures and beliefs. Understanding those terms will shed some light on the culture of the patient, which has their own intentions, beliefs, and rules as well. Breaking down ethnocentrism to find an agreement is a good goal to accomplish in order have successful prognosis and healing. In addition, shedding the ethnocentrism will allow the doctors to see the different cultural beliefs and not judge right away. Although, some cultural remedies may not always work, it’s wrong for people to have the mindset of ethnocentrism without even considering their beliefs first.
In modern medicine when an ailment arises it can be quickly diagnosed, attributed to a precise bacteria, virus, or body system, and treated with medication, surgery or therapy. During the time before rational medical thought, this streamlined system of treatment was unheard of, and all complaints were attributed to the will of the multitude of commonly worshiped Greek gods (Greek Medicine 1). It was during the period of Greek rationalism that a perceptible change in thought was manifested in the attitudes towards treating disease. Ancient Greece is often associated with its many brilliant philosophers, and these great thinkers were some of the first innovators to make major developments in astrology, physics, math and even medicine. Among these academics was Hippocrates, one of the first e...
Medical anthropologists examine epidemic outbreaks through numerous approaches. According to Joralemon, “Epidemics offer particularly vivid demonstrations of the interconnections between biological, social, and cultural components in the human experience of disease” (2010:29). Many times these approaches cannot function on their own accord and rely on each other to solve the epidemic. It is the job of the medical anthropologist to put all the pieces of the disease puzzle together.