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
Results 1-5 of 68
Page
... 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 ...
... 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 ...
Page
... understanding. The course of future research remains open. Though Good adheres to matters having to do with illness and healing, the implications of his engagement with biological reductionism in its medical stronghold will reverberate ...
... understanding. The course of future research remains open. Though Good adheres to matters having to do with illness and healing, the implications of his engagement with biological reductionism in its medical stronghold will reverberate ...
Page
... understanding the world and organizing social life than we do. Kin systems are part of this social order, and with the important exception of our assumptions about the prohibition of incest, diversity of family relations seems only ...
... understanding the world and organizing social life than we do. Kin systems are part of this social order, and with the important exception of our assumptions about the prohibition of incest, diversity of family relations seems only ...
Page
... understanding about the achievements of Victorian society and the family as a dimension of it. Societies are progressive. Change results from increasing knowledge of the order of Nature and increasing conformity of society to that ...
... understanding about the achievements of Victorian society and the family as a dimension of it. Societies are progressive. Change results from increasing knowledge of the order of Nature and increasing conformity of society to that ...
Page
... understanding of language and experience counter to that in much of the medical social sciences, and frames a quite different set of issues. Medical anthropology has thus come to be a site for joining debate of critical social ...
... understanding of language and experience counter to that in much of the medical social sciences, and frames a quite different set of issues. Medical anthropology has thus come to be a site for joining debate of critical social ...
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