Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 1994 - Medical - 242 pages
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.

From inside the book

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
References
208
Author Index
234
Subject Index
239
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information