Medicine, Rationality and Experience An Anthropological Perspective [Hardcover]

A 1993 analysis of the role of cultural factors in the experience of illness, countering the scientific view of folk medicine as superstitious practice.Arguing that medical science's denial of folk medicine neglects many facets of Western practice, this analysis draws on personal anthropological research in America and the Middle East to explore the role of cultural factors within the experience of illness and medical practice.Arguing that medical science's denial of folk medicine neglects many facets of Western practice, this analysis draws on personal anthropological research in America and the Middle East to explore the role of cultural factors within the experience of illness and medical practice.Medicine supposedly offers a scientific account of the human body and of illness, and it follows that scientific medicine treats all forms of folk medicine as little more than superstitious practices. Professor Good argues that this impoverished perspective neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his own anthropological research in America and the Middle East, his analysis of illness and medicine explores the role of cultural factors in the experience of illness and the practice of medicine.Preface; 1. Medical anthropology and the problem of belief; 2. Illness representations in medical anthropology: a reading of the field; 3. How medicine constructs its objects; 4. Semiotics and the study of medical reality; 5. The body, illness experience, and the lifeworld: a phenomenological account of chronic pain; 6. The narrative representation of illness; 7. Aesthetics, rationality and medical anthropology. The book reflects more than two decades of Good's work as a researcher, writer, and teacher....offers an excellent overview of some of the controversies in medical anthropology today and provides ample ammunition for those who would demonstrate the field's relevance to the practice of medicine. Mel#L