Social Lives of Medicines

ISBN-13: 9780521804691 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 212 str.

Susan Reynolds Whyte; Sjaak Van Der Geest; Anita Hardon

Opis

The focus of this book is medicines (swallowed, injected, rubbed on), as understood by anthropologists concerned solely with their social uses. The text begins with examples of a mother medicating a child in various cultural contexts and ends with a broad review of the complex elements that determine the production and use of medicines. Since 1993, Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology has offered researchers and instructors monographs and edited collections of leading scholarship in one of the most lively and popular subfields of cultural and social anthropology. Beginning in 2002, the CSMA series presents theme booksworks that synthesize emerging scholarship from relatively new subfields or that reinterpret the literature of older ones. Designed as course material for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and for professionals in related areas (physicians, nurses, public health workers, and medical sociologists), these theme books will demonstrate how work in medical anthropology is carried out and convey the importance of a given topic for a wide variety of readers. About 160 pages in length, the theme books are not simply staid reviews of the literature. They are, instead, new ways of conceptualizing topics in medical anthropology that take advantage of current research and the growing edges of the field.

Recenzje

'It is difficult to do justice to a book that is full of so many different ethnographic studies and details. The plethora of ethnographic material is the book's big strength.' Journal of Social Anthropology

Spis treści

Part I. Introduction: 1. An anthropology of materia medica; Part II. The Consumers: 2. Mothers and children: the efficacies of drugs; 3. Villagers and local remedies: the symbolic nature of medicines; 4. Women in distress: medicines for control; 5. Sceptical consumers: doubts about medicines; Part III. The Providers: 6. Drug vendors and their market: the commodification of health; 7. Pharmacists as doctors: bridging the sectors of health care; 8. Injectionists: the attraction of technology; 9. Prescribing physicians: medicines as communication; Part IV. The Strategists: 10. Manufacturers: scientific claims, commercial aims; 11. Health planners: making and contesting drug policy; Part V. Conclusion: 12. Anthropologists and the sociality of medicines.