First Class Session / Opening of the Class 08/30/99
I. What is Medical Anthropology?
-There are many definitions. Medical anthropology is perceived in many ways. The textbooks out there vary widely in their perspective. Here is a working definition for this course:
-Medical anthropology is the study of health and disease from an anthropological perspective.
-Be sure to read pp xxi-xxiv and pp 7-11 in the McElroyTEXT.
-We are so used to the dominant medical system in this country that we lose sight that in other societies, people can have an entirely different perspective of disease, its causes, and how it is treated. Remember the term ethnocentric?
-In the readings, mainstream medicine will be called variously western medicine, biomedicine, rational medicine, cosmopolitan medicine..
-We perceive it as an absolute, while we view other systems as strange, weird, and easily associate them with their cultural setting. Some day what we have will look quaint.
-We are a culture that admires technology. Our medicine shows it.
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We need to mention another distinction made in anthropology:
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-Here is an example: There is a unit in this text on KURU, a peculiar disease discovered after World War II in New Guinea. It is a slow onset disease. The term means 'fear and trembling.' The locals perceive it as sorcery. Western scientists perceive it as a 'slow virus', really caused by a prion; it is similar to Mad Cow and Scrapie in cows/sheep.
-Each culture has its own world view, its model for understanding disease.
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II. Environment, Culture and Health (corresponds to TEXT pp 7-11)
-The author introduces you to the term and concept of MEDICAL ECOLOGY. It is the study of health and disease in an environmental context.
-Understand here and now that medical ecology refers to both culture and to the physical environment.
-Anthropology seeks to be holistic, to see the whole picture.
-Historically, this becomes important.
-Sedentary living / farming villages began 10,000 ya. With domestication, nutrition changed; often for the worse. Sanitation in villages brought new problems of intestinal and parasitic disease. Domesticated animals brought new infections some of which became the famous 'crown' (epidemic) diseases. In time some (like measles) became exclusively human and can be sustained only in large 'crowds.'
-Urbanization is moving along at an accelerated pace. Mexico City is approaching 20 million. We are living in a brave new world! It is a crowded lifeway for which evolution has not prepared us.
-Urbanization is something new (5300 YA). Often the voracious appetites of the cities devastated the environment
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III. Subdisciplines in Anthropology and Medical Anthropology McElroy Text pp 8-11((Harlow Video))
-If you've been through anthropology before, this will be familiar territory. To remember the subdivisions, think of the word PALE.
(1) Physical Anthropology
-This includes paleoanthropology (human origins), human variation, and primatology. They like coprolites!
-Anthropometry is literally "measurement of people." It dates back to Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's brilliant and eccentric cousin-a contemporary of Darwin and Mendel who founded biostatistics.
-It studies nutrition, growth & development; and disease in populations.
-Many aspects of biological anthropology are important tok military science 'to preserve the fighting strength.'
(2) Prehistoric Archaeology
-Mummies are of special interest. The best known ones come from Egypt, but others come from the Alps (Ice Man), Russia, Peru, and there is program on ones from China that aren't mongoloid peoples-those have blonde hair and blue eyes.
-There is a set of 500 year old mummies from Greenland.
-Skeletons and teeth tell much of life and health. These include Harris lines, trauma, anemia and much else.
-Archaeology seeks to reconstruct the lifeways of prehistoric peoples .
-Here is a tentatiave list of things studied:
-Trauma
-Alterations in the rib cage shown by divers for pearls (in South America). Mississippian Indians in this country had boney tumors in their ears - a clue to their diving for clams.
-We have a unit on trepanation.
-Dental diseases
-Congenital defects: for example, a fetus found with King Tutankhamum had spinal bifida.
(3) Linguistics
-Ancient languages tell much of past medical practices. "The World's Oldest Prescription" is a (copy) clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia that tells much of their medical treatment. It is very different from what your ideas on medicine.
-Egypt recorded much of their life; much is known of their medical and dental practices. Picture from Kom Ombo.
(4) Cultural Anthropology / Ethnography / Ethnology
-Health and healing
-Adaptation to disease. This can be as old as malaria and sickle cell anemia or living with AIDS.
-Herbal medicines; trance, shamans.
-Applied studies in international public health and community health programs.
-Personality and mental health in diverse cultural settings.
-Primitive medicine.
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(this section from READER pp 10-18)
IV. HEALTH, SICKNESS, and ILLNESS taken from p 11
-In our society, biomedicine seems to define health 'as the absence of disease.' When we get to alternative medical systems