Biomedical Practice and Anthropological Theory: Frameworks and Directions
Annual Review of AnthropologyPublished 1 October 1983
Robert A. Hahn, Arthur Kleinman
Citations212
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score0.98
SNIP2.77
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
While Biomedicine may have its principal origins in Western civilization, and has even been a leading edge of modernism, it has incorporated and now penetrates other traditions as well and the exclusive erudition and catholicism connoted by "Cosmopolitan" is inaccurate.
Abstract
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Keywords
Social Sciences
American Sociological ReviewThe Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
26,149 Citations1956Kaspar D. Naegele, Erving Goffman
Exchange and Power in Social Life
13,632 Citations2017Peter M. Blau
ScienceThe Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine
12,233 Citations1977George L. Engel
The Social System
8,741 Citations1951Talcott Parsons
Macat Library eBooksThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions
5,423 Citations2017Jo Hedesan, Joseph Tendler
The American Historical ReviewMichel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
3,560 Citations1983Dominick LaCapra, Hubert L. Dreyfus +1 more
The American Historical ReviewThe Social Transformation of American Medicine
3,287 Citations1984Judith Walzer Leavitt, Paul Starr
American Journal of PsychiatryThe clinical application of the biopsychosocial model
3,260 Citations1980G.L. Engel
The implications of the biopsychosocial model for the study and care of a patient with an acute myocardial infarction are presented and contrasted with approaches used by adherents of the more traditional biomedical model.
Behaviour Research and TherapyThe social origins of depression
2,212 Citations1979M. B. Shapiro
A preliminary assessment is made of the book from the point of view of ‘relative objectivism’, which is defined, to decide whether it is worth while devoting the time that would be necessary for an assimilation of all the findings of a large scale and apparently thorough study.
American Sociological ReviewProfession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge.
2,067 Citations1971Geraldine Tate Clausen, Eliot Freidson
On Human Nature
1,874 Citations1978Edward O. Wilson
Archives of Internal MedicineMedical Education in the United States and Canada.
1,639 Citations1911Abraham Flexner
The discourse of medicine : dialectics of medical interviews
1,570 Citations1984Elliot G. Mishler
Contemporary Sociology A Journal of ReviewsForgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure.
825 Citations1981Robert S. Broadhead, Charles L. Bosk
"Forgive and Remember" is a work about errors in the practice of surgery, written by a sociologist who spent 18 months with the surgical service of a major American teaching hospital.
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryNeurasthenia and depression: A study of somatization and culture in China
678 Citations1982Arthur Kleinman
Though neurasthenia can be understood in several distinctive ways, it is most clinically useful to regard it as bioculturally patterned illness experience related to either depression and other diseases or to culturally sanctioned idioms of distress and psychosocial coping.
The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire
642 Citations1978John M. Janzen
The political economy of health
502 Citations1979Lesley Doyal, Imogen Pennell
Theoretical foundations: understanding medicine and health, the national health service in Britain women, medicine and social control - the case of the NHS medicine and imperialism.
The Meaning of Symptoms: A Cultural Hermeneutic Model for Clinical Practice
378 Citations1981Byron J. Good, Mary‐Jo DelVecchio Good
Any good doctor knows that the patient’s complaint is more extensive than his symptom, and the state of sickness more comprehensive than localized pain or dysfunction.
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryThe health seeking process: An approach to the natural history of illness
337 Citations1977Noel J. Chrisman
The health seeking process is proposed in this paper as a means to document natural histories of illness in any subculture and concepts from medical anthropology and medical sociology are related to five components of health seeking.
Culture Medicine and Psychiatry“Feed a cold, starve a fever” — folk models of infection in an english suburban community, and their relation to medical treatment
305 Citations1978Cecil G. Helman
At the interface between physician and patient, biomedical diagnoses and treatment are more ‘negotiable’ than previously realised — and this has important implications for the delivery of health care.
Annals of Internal MedicineThe Courage to Fail. A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis.
296 Citations1979
American Journal of SociologySocial Constructionist and Positivist Approaches to the Sociology of Emotions
278 Citations1981Theodore D. Kemper
American AnthropologistSome Implications of Medical Beliefs and Practices for Social Anthropology
227 Citations1976Allan H. Young
A people's medical beliefs and practices persist because they answer instrumental and moral imperatives, and they are empirically effective, which enables sickness episodes to communicate and confirm ideas about the real world.
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryObesity as a culture-bound syndrome
224 Citations1982Cheryl Ritenbaugh
An overview of the evidence that culture has shaped both the definition of the disease over time and its treatment and a four-part definition to permit examination and comparison of disease categories in any system, including biomedicine are offered.
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryHyper-tension: A folk illness with a medical name
220 Citations1980Dan Blumhagen
This study presents an example of how illness beliefs perform these functions in urban, mainstream America with a popular model of the disease ‘hypertension’ and with other less frequent models which were observed in this sample.
Social Science & Medicine Part B Medical AnthropologyThe discourse on stress and the reproduction of conventional knowledge
191 Citations1980Allan H. Young
A framework emphasizing the importance of utility and context to knowledge producers, particularly the researchers' informants, and the social determinants of knowledge is adopted.
Current AnthropologyAnthropology of Symbolic Healing [and Comments and Reply]
172 Citations1979Daniel E. Moerman, Jean Benoist +15 more
Sociology of the sciences/Sociology of the sciences yearbookThe Social Production of Scientific Knowledge
170 Citations1977Everett Mendelsohn, Peter Weingart +1 more
Social Science & Medicine Part E Medical PsychologyBiological basis of stress-related mortality
161 Citations1981Peter Sterling, Joe Eyer
The extraordinary sensitivity of the brain and the neuro-endocrine system to psychosocial intervention suggests that in modern, as in primitive society, these are the treatments that will prove safest and most effective.
Social Science & Medicine Part B Medical AnthropologyMedical anthropology and development: A theoretical perspective
155 Citations1980Ronald Frankenberg
Analysis of local medical systems should be carried out in a way that demonstrates the articulation of customs at the local level with ideological, political and economic systems at national and international levels, reflecting a broad vision of the goals of anthropology.
American Journal of SociologyA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Orifice: Women in Gynecology Textbooks
154 Citations1973Diana Scully, Pauline B. Bart
An analysis of 27 gynecology texts written over the past three decades reveals a continuing tendency to present traditional views of female sexuality and personality as sterotyped as primarily wives and mothers and as having a lesser capacity for sex.
Social Science & MedicineThe work of hospitalized patients
146 Citations1982Anselm L. Strauss, Shizuko Fagerhaugh +2 more
Patient's participation in their own care, conceived as work, is the central theme of this paper and the patients' work in relation to technology is the second theme.
American Journal of SociologyThe Stages of a Medical Career
144 Citations1948Oswald Hall
The members of the medical profession are heavily dependent on a set of formal institutions and informal organizations that functioned to control appointments to the medical institutions, to exclude or penalize intruders, to distribute patients, and to enforce rules and control competition.
Annual Review of AnthropologyNon-Western Medical Systems
131 Citations1982Peter Worsley
It is argued that each of the terms in the phrase "non-Western medical systems" contains a built-in hidden assumption.
New England Journal of MedicineOccupational Rituals in Patient Management
116 Citations1980Charles L. Bosk
Two major rituals for evaluating outcomes of treatment decisions, grand rounds and the mortality and morbidity conference, provide a forum for dramatizing success and failure, respectively.
Annals of Internal MedicineKnowledge and Use of Placebos by House Officers and Nurses
110 Citations1979James S. Goodwin, JEAN M. GOODWIN +1 more
The majority of physicians and nurses greatly underestimated the percentage of patients who experience pain relief when given placebo, suggesting that this is precisely the type of patient "at risk" for placebo treatment.
Making It Crazy
102 Citations1985Sue E. Estroff
Annals of Internal MedicineA Marxist View of Medical Care
99 Citations1978Howard Waitzkin
Health praxis, the disciplined uniting of study and action, involves advocacy of "nonreformist reforms" and concrete types of political struggle.
International Journal of Health ServicesA Larger Perspective on the Flexner Report
98 Citations1975Howard S. Berliner
The Flexner Report of 1910 is placed in the larger perspective of dynamics of American society in the years surrounding the turn of the 19th century to look at medicine as an integral part of society affected by the contradictions affecting the larger society.
Review of Radical Political EconomicsThe Political Ecology of Disease
93 Citations1977Meredeth Turshen
The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly Health and SocietyToward an Epidemiology of Work Disability
89 Citations1980Edward H. Yelin, Michael Nevitt +1 more
This study suggests a new emphasis on social characteristics of the workplace in public policy toward disability, which currently emphasizes the "human capital" with which persons with impairments confront the labor market.
Social Science & Medicine Part A Medical SociologyMedicine, superstructure and micropolitics
85 Citations1979Howard Waitzkin
American AnthropologistSigns of the Self: An Exploration in Semiotic Anthropology
74 Citations1980Milton Singer
Contemporary Sociology A Journal of ReviewsThe Sanctity of Social Life: Physicians' Treatment of Critically Ill Patients.
74 Citations1976Robert H. Coombs, Diana Crane
Models and Practice in Medicine: Menopause as Syndrome or Life Transition?
70 Citations1985Margaret Lock
The susceptibility of menopause to numerous interpretations is demonstrated and the generation of clinical models from current information available to physicians is examined and it is suggested that these can be thought of as folk models.
Culture and Biological Man
64 Citations1974Eliot D. Chapple
Sociology of the sciences/Sociology of the sciences yearbookThe Semantics of Medical Discourse
62 Citations1981Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo Good
Steven Toulmin (1977) recently observed that during the 1960’s, students of the history and philosophy of science began to shift their attention from the comfortable study of the inner logic of scientific systems — the genetic history of science — toward a serious examination of the relationship of science systems to other aspects of society.
The "Gift of Life" and Its Reciprocation
61 Citations1972Talcott Parsons, Renée C. Fox +1 more
The "narrowing" consists in trying to focus on the institutionalization in America of the promotion of health and the care of illness, with special reference to the medical profession and its ethical orientations.
Social Network Influences on Morbid Episodes and the Career of Help Seeking
61 Citations1981John B. McKinlay
British Journal of SociologyEssays in Medical Sociology: Journeys into the Field
57 Citations1981Ray Fitzpatrick, Renée C. Fox
This second, augmented edition includes Professor Fox's more recent contributions to the expanding field of the sociology of medicine, and includes a new introduction, "Endings, Beginnings and Continuities."
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryProtein-energy malnutrition as a culture-bound syndrome
48 Citations1982Claire Cassidy
If those who design and facilitate intervention to alleviate hunger can come to understand that the scientific explanatory model of protein-energy malnutrition is only one among several cogent models, they will be in a strong position to understand intervention failure and possibly to overcome it.
JAMAAn Informal Appraisal of the Current Status of 'Medical Sociology'
42 Citations1981Robert G. Petersdorf
The results showed that between 40% and 50% of medical students are taught medical sociology during their preclinical years, usually by several departments, and in general, departments of medicine held a negative attitude toward medical sociology, while departments of family medicine thought the subject was important and worthwhile.
PubMedPhysicians as gatekeepers: illness certification as a rationing device.
42 Citations1979Stone Da
Several non-medical factors influence the ultimate outcome of this allocation process, which, in theory, rests on clinical decision-making: the specificity and restrictiveness of the formal definitions of illness and disability used by a program; the structure of the determination process; the overall policy of the organization on distribution of benefits.
American AnthropologistVoodoo Death: New Thoughts on an Old Explanation<sup>1</sup>
42 Citations1974Barbara W. Lex
American Journal of SociologyTypes of Medical Careers
42 Citations1949Oswald Hall
Three distinctive types of medical careers are isolated in terms of how patients are attracted, retained, and passed on to other doctors, how each doctor fits into the system of medical institutions, and how he relates himself to his colleagues.
Culture and Psychiatric Illness: Biomedical and Ethnomedical Aspects
41 Citations1982Horacio Fábrega
It is assumed that an individual’s theory of illness and of self, which impact on one another and are complementary, strongly influence how an underlying psychiatric disease condition expresses itself psychosocially or in psychiatric illness generally.
A Cultural Prescription for Medicocentrism
40 Citations1981John-Henry Pfifferling
The anthropologist tries to understand the patient's perception of clinical reality, while the physician tries to fit patient experiences into objectified symptoms so that the transformation allows him/her to make appropriate clinical decisions in the biomedical realm.
Social Science & Medicine (1967)Professional socialization in a surgical specialty: Acquiring medical judgment
37 Citations1975Kathleen Knafl, Gary L. Burkett
It is learned that residents cultivated their orthopedic judgment through a continual process of reaching a decision regarding the treatment of a specific case and subsequently evaluating the outcome of that treatment.
MIT Press eBooksSystems and medical care
37 Citations1970Alan Sheldon, Frank Baker +1 more
This book represents a first effort at bringing together a variety of systems theories and techniques and exploring their practical applicability to the health care system.
Culture Medicine and Psychiatry?Treat the patient, not the lab? Internal medicine and the concept of ?Person?
35 Citations1982Robert A. Hahn
An analysis of the talk of a practitioner of internal medicine in the U.S.A. reveals an understanding of patients as syndromes and the work of medicine is ‘physiological integrity’, distinct from personal and interpersonal integrity.
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryA Chicano version of the sickness impact profile (SIP)
33 Citations1980Betty S. Gilson, Donna Erickson +4 more
Using a measure of functional health status, the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP), a procedure for and analysis of a Chicano Spanish translation of the SIP is presented.
New England Journal of MedicineProliferation of Certification in Medical Specialties: Productive or Counterproductive
28 Citations1976Robert A. Chase
The case may be made that proliferation of certification in medical specialties may be counterproductive in terms of health care for the United States.
Journal of Health Politics Policy and LawDiagnosis and the Dole: The Function of Illness in American Distributive Politics
25 Citations1979Deborah A. Stone
The author suggests that medical certification as a distributive mechanisms serves certain latent political functions, such as allowing welfare programs to be responsive to political unrest, siphoning off opposition to controversial policies by the granting of medical exemptions to intense opponents, are reducing political conflict by using physicians as arbiters.
International Journal of Health ServicesConvenience and the Occurrence of Births Induction of Labor in the United States and Canada
24 Citations1979Ronald R. Rindfuss, Judith L. Ladinsky +3 more
The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of MedicineAn Anthropological Perspective on Medical Knowledge
22 Citations1980Andrew Young
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryThe twice-born: ?Christian psychiatry? and christian psychiatrists
22 Citations1982Atwood D. Gaines
This essay introduces Christian psychiatrists into the growing literature on Western psychiatry and biomedicine and seeks to describe specific beliefs and practices of Christian psychiatrists as a means of examining the reality of an ascribed corporate existence, i.e., ‘Christian Psychiatry’.
Illness Maintenance and the New American Sick Role
20 Citations1982Linda Alexander
In this chapter the implicit assumption of “a” sick role is challenged on the basis of cultural change in the total pattern of illness experiences and illness construction.
The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of MedicineSystems of Medical Knowledge: A Comparative Approach
18 Citations1978Arthur Kleinman, E. Mendelsohn
Social Science & MedicineNorthern Thai health care alternatives
17 Citations1982Daniel H. Weisberg
A connection between those efforts to control the course of healing and the shape of the medical system is postulated and explored here.
Culture Medicine and PsychiatryA micro-analysis of ?senility?: the responses of the family and the health professionals
16 Citations1983Colleen L. Johnson, Frank A. Johnson
Through a case study analysis, the interactions between the patients, their families and the health professions are analyzed as a three-stage process where the patient's behaviors become increasingly specified and elaborated and behaviors formerly tolerated become a formal problem where the solution is likely to be institutionalization.
The Hastings Center StudiesThe 'Sick Role' Revisited
16 Citations1973Miriam Siegler, Humphry Osmond
It is shown that when one goes to examine actual cases of occupancy of the sick role, they rarely correspond with this ideal, which tends to cast doubt on the usefulness of the concept.
Perspectives in biology and medicineThe Evolution of Medical Specialism
16 Citations1979John M. Luce, Richard L. Byyny
As specialism continues to flourish, a new cadre of highly trained generalists is emerging to deal with the medical needs of most patients, and this trend is discussed along with the history of medical specialism, particu- larly in the United States, and its impact on health care.
Social Science & Medicine (1967)Western medicine's attempt to become more scientific: Examples from the United States and Thailand [1]
14 Citations1977James Nelson Riley
In contemporary Western medicine there remain contradictions between therapeutics and the scientific study of disease, and in the West and elsewhere there remain a variety of medical sub-cultures.
The Ethnographic Mode of Teaching Clinical Behavioral Science
8 Citations1982Howard F. Stein
In recent years the salience of behavioral sciences in medical education in general has become increasingly recognized and can be readily adduced from the presence of a behavioral science component of the National Board Examinations.
ScienceCritical Care at Tianjin's First Central Hospital and the Fourth Modernization
8 Citations1982Renée C. Fox, Judith P. Swazey
This case study of the Critical Care Unit at Tianjin's First Central Hospital, its physician-director, and one of its patients provides a portrait of how the policy of the four modernizations is being applied to the field of medicine in the People's Republic of China.
…