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. |
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Patients may have beliefs about their illnesses; doctors have knowledge. As Good observes, however, following Wilfred Cantwell Smith, our current concept of belief as something held to be true without certain knowledge is itself ...
Patients may have beliefs about their illnesses; doctors have knowledge. As Good observes, however, following Wilfred Cantwell Smith, our current concept of belief as something held to be true without certain knowledge is itself ...
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Educate the patient, medical journals advise clinicians, and solve the problems of noncompliance that plague the treatment of chronic disease. Investigate public beliefs about vaccinations or risky health behaviors ...
Educate the patient, medical journals advise clinicians, and solve the problems of noncompliance that plague the treatment of chronic disease. Investigate public beliefs about vaccinations or risky health behaviors ...
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The primary tasks of clinical medicine are thus diagnosis - that is, the interpretation of the patient's symptoms by ... While patients' symptoms may be coded in cultural language, the primary interpretive task of the clinician is to ...
The primary tasks of clinical medicine are thus diagnosis - that is, the interpretation of the patient's symptoms by ... While patients' symptoms may be coded in cultural language, the primary interpretive task of the clinician is to ...
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... and the meaningfulness of a proposition - including, for example, a patient's complaint or a doctor's diagnosis - is almost solely dependent upon “how the world is, as a matter of empirical fact, constituted” (Harrison 1972: 33).
... and the meaningfulness of a proposition - including, for example, a patient's complaint or a doctor's diagnosis - is almost solely dependent upon “how the world is, as a matter of empirical fact, constituted” (Harrison 1972: 33).
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Such complaints (for example of chronic pain)10 are often held to reflect patients' beliefs or psychological states, that is subjective opinions and experiences which may have no grounds in disordered physiology and thus in objective ...
Such complaints (for example of chronic pain)10 are often held to reflect patients' beliefs or psychological states, that is subjective opinions and experiences which may have no grounds in disordered physiology and thus in objective ...
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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,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
Bibliographic information
| Title | Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures |
| Author | Byron J. Good |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, 1993 |
| ISBN | 1316582485, 9781316582480 |
| Subjects | › › Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social Social Science / Anthropology / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |