Exploring Medical Anthropology

Now in its fourth edition, Exploring Medical Anthropology provides a concise and engaging introduction to medical anthropology. It presents competing theoretical perspectives in a balanced fashion, highlighting points of conflict and convergence. Concrete examples and the author's personal research experiences are utilized to explain some of the discipline's most important insights, such as that biology and culture matter equally in the human experience of disease and that medical anthropology can help to alleviate human suffering. The text has been thoroughly updated for the fourth edition, including fresh case studies and a new chapter on drugs. It contains a range of pedagogical features to support teaching and learning, including images, text boxes, a glossary, and suggested further reading.

Donald Joralemon is Professor of Anthropology at Smith College, USA.

1. What's So Cultural about Disease?  2. Anthropological Questions and Methods in the Study of Sickness and Healing  3. Recognizing Biological, Social, and Cultural Interconnections: Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives on a Cholera Epidemic  4. Expanding the Vision of Medical Anthropology: Critical and Interpretive Views of the Cholera Epidemic  5. The Global Petri Dish  6. Healers and the Healing Professions  7. Drugs  8. Applying Medical Anthropology  9. Anthropology and Medical Ethics  10. A Look Back and a Glance Ahead