Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective

by Byron J. Good

• ISBN13: 9780521425766
• ISBN10: 052142576X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

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.