Medicine, Rationality and Experience
An Anthropological Perspective

A 1993 analysis of the role of cultural factors in the experience of illness, countering the scientific view of folk medicine as superstitious practice.

Byron J. Good (Author)

9780521415583, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 November 1993

262 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.52 kg

"Medical anthropologists and anthropologists in other subdisciplines will find Medicine, Rationality, and Experience satisfying because of Good's historical treatment of theoretical developments in the field and his imaginative reconfiguring of a phenomenology of medical practices. This book will also be of interest to physicians and other health care providers, social scientists, philosophers, and medical humanists concerned and curious about the social construction of illness, suffering, and medical knowledge....His arguments and his illustrations are compelling and thought-provoking. As in the past, Professor Good reminds us once again of the transformative power of the individual and the social imaginations in the context of illness and disease." Patricia A. Marshall, Academic Medicine

Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.

Preface
1. Medical anthropology and the problem of belief
2. Illness representations in medical anthropology: a reading of the field
3. How medicine constructs its objects
4. Semiotics and the study of medical reality
5. The body, illness experience, and the lifeworld: a phenomenological account of chronic pain
6. The narrative representation of illness
7. Aesthetics, rationality and medical anthropology.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]