Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological PerspectiveBiomedicine 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. |
From inside the book
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... biological object. His approach is interpretive rather than positivist. Annie Dillard observes in The Writing Life that When you write ... biology and cuts its moorings in positivist epistemology. Medical science, he argues, is in X Foreword.
... biological object. His approach is interpretive rather than positivist. Annie Dillard observes in The Writing Life that When you write ... biology and cuts its moorings in positivist epistemology. Medical science, he argues, is in X Foreword.
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... biology while still recognizing “the validity of local knowledge in matters of sickness and suffering” (p. 63). Chapter 3 is the first ethnographic chapter of the book. (Here as elsewhere Good discusses material gathered jointly with ...
... biology while still recognizing “the validity of local knowledge in matters of sickness and suffering” (p. 63). Chapter 3 is the first ethnographic chapter of the book. (Here as elsewhere Good discusses material gathered jointly with ...
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... biological facts external to culture that can provide a basis for comparison and translation. Their meaning derives instead ... biology. Their interpretation requires attention to the complex array of conceptual systems in which they ...
... biological facts external to culture that can provide a basis for comparison and translation. Their meaning derives instead ... biology. Their interpretation requires attention to the complex array of conceptual systems in which they ...
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... biological reductionism in its medical stronghold will reverberate across the spectrum of anthropology. Several ... biology of organisms. ANTHONY T. CARTER, Editor The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures Preface This book consists of the ...
... biological reductionism in its medical stronghold will reverberate across the spectrum of anthropology. Several ... biology of organisms. ANTHONY T. CARTER, Editor The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures Preface This book consists of the ...
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... biological; it is what we mean by Nature and its impingement on our lives. Our anthropological research thus divides rather ... biology, about Nature. This knowledge has yielded ever more powerful therapeutics and resulted in longer and ...
... biological; it is what we mean by Nature and its impingement on our lives. Our anthropological research thus divides rather ... biology, about Nature. This knowledge has yielded ever more powerful therapeutics and resulted in longer and ...
Contents
a reading of the field | |
How medicine constructs its objects | |
Semiotics and the study of medical reality | |
a phenomenological account of chronic pain | |
The narrative representation of illness | |
Aesthetics rationality and medical anthropology | |
Notes | |
References | |
Author Index | |
Subject Index | |
Other editions - View all
Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective Byron J. Good Limited preview - 1994 |
Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective Byron Good No preview available - 1994 |
Common terms and phrases
activities American analysis anthro argued Arthur Kleinman Azande biology biomedicine blood body care-seeking Cassirer chapter chronic pain claims clinical cognitive concept constituted context critical critique cross-cultural cultural described developed discourse discussion disease disorders distinctive domains elaborated empirical empiricist epilepsy epistemological ethnographic everyday example fainting formulation Foucault healing Health Belief Model human humoral Ibn Sina illness experience illness narratives illness representations individual interpretive practices interview investigating Islamic Islamic medicine issues Kleinman language Lewis Henry Morgan lifeworld literature Mary-Jo meaning medical anthropology medical knowledge medical practice medical systems Meliha models Morgan Lectures natural organized paradigm patients persons perspective phenomenology physician problem psychological rationality reality represent response role schizophrenia seizures semantic networks semiotic sense sickness social sciences society soteriological story structure studies of illness suffering symbolic forms symptoms theoretical theory therapeutic told tradition treatment understanding W. H. R. Rivers writing