Books in the Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care series

Focusing on the history of one medical field-rehabilitation medicine-this book provides the first systematic analysis of the underlying forces that shape medical specialization, challenging traditional explanations of occupational specialization.

The work of inner-city emergency psychiatric units might best be described as 'medicine under siege'. This title is based on the author's two-year immersion in one such unit and its work.

Investigates the social and political dimensions of medical pluralism in the rural town of Kachitu, Bolivia. The author explores how local gossip, rumours and opinions surrounding medical care contribute greatly to a sense of religious and ethnic identity.

An ethnographic study of Malay healing ceremonies involving the practices of shamen, who place their patients in a trance and encourage them to express their inner thoughts in a type of performance. The ceremony reveals a psychological content relevant to Western medical practice today.

These essays ask how patients and practitioners know what they know - what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. The authors offer a range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.

Stephen Kunitz's work raises crucial issues for public policy in the medical field, and will be valuable for social scientists, physicians, and health professionals concerned with the social context of public health and other medical facilities.

Why does tuberculosis, a disease which is both curable and preventable, continue to produce over 50,000 new cases a year in South Africa, primarily among blacks? In answering this question Randall Packard traces the history of one of the most devastating diseases in twentieth-century Africa, against the background of the changing political and economic forces that have shaped South African society from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. These forces have generated a growing backlog of disease among black workers and their families and at the same time have prevented the development of effective public health measures for controlling it. Packard's rich and nuanced analysis is a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on South Africa's social history as well as to the history of medicine and the political economy of health.

Offers a picture of the daily life of rural Malays, focusing on their dietary practices and the ritual and medical aspects of childbirth procedures.

Presents a framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. This book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural perspective on the components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry.

Music and dance play a central role in the 'healing arts' of the Senoi Temiar, a group of hunters and horticulturalists dwelling in the rainforest of peninsular Malaysia. This title shows how the sounds and gestures of music and dance acquire a potency that can transform thoughts, emotions, and bodies.

The contributors to this study of medical anthropology examine the contexts in which all socially and culturally constructed knowledge is produced and practised in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology and anthropology.

Sufferers, finding that chronic pain alters every aspect of life, often become frustrated and distrust a profession seemingly unable to explain or effectively treat their illness. This volume searches out more effective ways to describe and analyze the human context of pain.

Some of the most innovative and provocative work on the emotions and illness is occurring in cross-cultural research on depression. This book presents the work of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who examine the controversies, agreements, and conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of such research.

Emphasizes the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present. This title illustrates how the most basic facts of everyday life encourage the spread of disease and chape the possibilities of survival.

This is a translation into English of the complete "Yin-Hai Jing-Wei", a classic 15th-century text on Chinese ophthalmology. This work offers an unprecedented view of the practice of medicine, and specifically eye care, in pre-modern China.

Based on fieldwork conducted in Japan during 1973 and 1974, this study deals with the philosophical foundations and historical development of East Asian medicine, Japanese attitudes regarding health, illness, and the human body, and description of kanpo clinics, herbal pharmacies, acupuncture and moxibustion clinics, shiatsu and anma clinics.