Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective

ISBN-13: 9780521425766 / Angielski / Miękka / 1993 / 262 str.

Byron J Good

Opis

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.

Recenzje

"Medical anthropologists and anthropologists in other subdisciplines will find Medicine, Rationality, and Experience satisfying because of Good's historical treatment of theoretical developments in the field and his imaginative reconfiguring of a phenomenology of medical practices. This book will also be of interest to physicians and other health care providers, social scientists, philosophers, and medical humanists concerned and curious about the social construction of illness, suffering, and medical knowledge....His arguments and his illustrations are compelling and thought-provoking. As in the past, Professor Good reminds us once again of the transformative power of the individual and the social imaginations in the context of illness and disease." Patricia A. Marshall, Academic Medicine

Spis treści

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.