This study of adversity and its social causes in rural Uganda considers how people deal with life's uncertainties--sickness, suffering, marital problems, failure, and death. Divination may identify causes of misfortune, ranging from ancestors and spirits to sorcerers. Sufferers and their families will then try out a variety of remedial measures, including pharmaceuticals, sorcery substances, and sacrifices. But remedies often fail, and doubt and uncertainty persist. The peril of AIDS can also be understood in terms of the existing pattern of uncertainty.

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...

Western pharmaceuticals are flooding the Third World. Injections, capsules and tablets are available in city markets and village shops, from 'traditional' practitioners and street vendors, as well as from more orthodox sources like hospitals. Although many are aware of this 'pharmaceutical invasion', little has been written about how local people perceive and use these products. This book is a first attempt to remedy that situation. It presents studies of the ways Western medicines are circulated and understood in the cities and rural areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America. We feel that such...

This study of adversity and its social causes in rural Uganda considers how people deal with life's uncertainties--sickness, suffering, marital problems, failure, and death. Divination may identify causes of misfortune, ranging from ancestors and spirits to sorcerers. Sufferers and their families will then try out a variety of remedial measures, including pharmaceuticals, sorcery substances, and sacrifices. But remedies often fail, and doubt and uncertainty persist. The peril of AIDS can also be understood in terms of the existing pattern of uncertainty.

During the first decade of this millennium, many thousands of people in Uganda who otherwise would have died from AIDS got second chances at life. A massive global health intervention, the scaling up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), saved them and created a generation of people who learned to live with treatment. As clients they joined programs that offered free antiretroviral medicine and encouraged "positive living." Because ART is not a cure but a lifelong treatment regime, its consequences are far-reaching for society, families, and individuals. Drawing on personal accounts and a broad...

During the first decade of this millennium, many thousands of people in Uganda who otherwise would have died from AIDS got second chances at life. A massive global health intervention, the scaling up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), saved them and created a generation of people who learned to live with treatment. As clients they joined programs that offered free antiretroviral medicine and encouraged "positive living." Because ART is not a cure but a lifelong treatment regime, its consequences are far-reaching for society, families, and individuals. Drawing on personal accounts and a broad...