ANTHROP 1AA3 Lecture : 1AA3_Illness and Death.docx
16 May 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Medical anthropology is one of the most rapidly growing areas of research in anthropology. Ethnomedicine: the study of cross-cultural health systems has been a focus of research. The health system encompasses many areas: perceptions and classifications of health problems, prevention measures, diagnosis, healing (magical, religious, scientific healing substances), and healers. In the 1960s, when the term ethnomedicine first came into use, it referred only to non-western health systems and synonymous with the now abandoned term primitive medicine. Contemporary western biomedicine (wbm), a healing approach based on modern western science that emphasizes technology in diagnosing and treating health problems related to the human body, is an ethnomedical system, too. One set of concepts that medical anthropologists use to sort out the many cross-cultural labels and perception is the disease-illness dichotomy. In this model, disease refers to a biological health problem that is objective and universal, such as bacterial or viral infection or a broken arm.
