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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Contents
Medical anthropology and the problem of belief | 1 |
Illness representations in medical anthropology a reading of the field | 25 |
How medicine constructs its objects | 65 |
Semiotics and the study of medical reality | 88 |
The body illness experience and the lifeworld a phenomenological account of chronic pain | 116 |
The narrative representation of illness | 135 |
Aesthetics rationality and medical anthropology | 166 |
Notes | 185 |
208 | |
234 | |
239 | |
Other editions - View all
Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective Byron J. Good Limited preview - 1993 |
Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective Byron Good No preview available - 1994 |
Common terms and phrases
activities analysis anthro argued Arthur Kleinman Azande biology biomedical biomedicine blood body care-seeking Cassirer central 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 medicine Meliha models Morgan Lectures natural organized paradigm patients persons perspective phenomenology physician problem psychiatry psychological rationality reality represent response role seizures semantic networks semiotic sense serve society soteriological story structure studies of illness suffering symbolic forms symptoms theoretical theory therapeutic told tradition treatment understanding W. H. R. Rivers writing