This reader looks at both the biological and cultural aspects of health and healing within a comparative framework.

Health and Healing in Comparative Perspective provides both fascinating comparative ethnographic detail and a theoretical framework for organizing and interpreting information about health. While there are many health-related fields represented in this book, its core discipline is medical anthropology and its main focus is the comparative approach. Cross-cultural comparison gives anthropological analysis breadth while the evolutionary time scale gives it depth. These two features have always been fundamental to anthropology and continue to distinguish it among the social sciences. A third feature is the in-depth knowledge of culture produced by anthropological methods such as participant-observation, involving long-term presence in and research among a study population. For medical anthropology, medical sociology, public health, nursing courses.

PART ONE: Healers and Healing Traditions
Introduction

1. Backing into the Future
Charles Leslie
2. Menopause: Lessons from Anthropology
Margaret Lock
Healing Traditions

3. Why Not Call Modern Medicine Alternative?
Don G. Bates
4. Concepts of Arthritis in India's Medical Traditions: Ayurvedic and Unani Perspectives
Judy F. Pugh
5. Homeopathic Medicine in the City of Oaxaca, Mexico: Patients' Perspectives and Observations
Michael B. Whiteford
6. The Epistemology of Traditional Healing Systems
Russel Barsh
Patients and Healers

7. Perturbing the System: "Hard Science", "Soft Science", and Social Science, the Anxiety and Madness of Method
Joan Cassell
8. Clown Doctors: Shaman Healers of Western Medicine
Linda Miller Van Blerkom
9. Shamanism and Its Discontents
Michael Fobes Brown
10. Distal Nursing
Ruth E. Malone
11. Witnessing and the Medical Gaze: How Medical Students Learn to See at a Free Clinic for the Homeless
Beverly Ann Davenport
PART TWO: Biocultural Approaches

Plasticity, Variation, Adaptation

12. Living at the Edge of Space
Christopher Wills
13. The Co-Evolution of People, Plants, and Parasites: Biological and Cultural Adaptations to Malaria
Nina L. Etkin
14. The Vital Role of the Skin in Human Natural History
Bruce A. Cohn
15. Why Genes Don't Count (for Racial Differences in Health)
Alan H. Goodman
Evolutionary Medicine

16. Evolution and the Origins of Disease
Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams
17. Evolutionary Health Promotion
S. Boyd Eaton, Beverly I. Strassman, Randolph M. Nesse, James V. Neel, Paul W. Ewald, George C. Williams, Alan B. Weder, Stanley B. Eaton III, Staffan Lindeberg, Melvin J. Konner, Iver Mysterud, and Loren Cordain
18. Evolutionary Health Promotion: A Consideration of Common Counterarguments
S. Boyd Eaton, Loren Cordain, and Staffan Lindeberg
Prehistory and History of Human Health

19. Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Diseases: The Third Epidemiologic Transition
Ronald Barrett, Christopher W. Kuzawa, Thomas McDade, and George J. Armelagos
20. Health Conditions before Columbus: Paleopathology of Native North Americans
Debra L. Martin and Alan H. Goodman
21. A Comparison of Health Complaints of Settled and Nomadic Turkana Men
Nanette L. Barkey, Benjamin C. Campbell, and Paul W. Leslie
22. The Resurgence of Disease: Social and Historical Perspectives on the "New" Tuberculosis
Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla
23. Implications of Pandemic Influenza for Bioterrorism Response
Monica Schoch-Spana
Ecology and Geography of Disease

24. Health Implications of Modern Agricultural Transformations: Malaria and Pellagra in Italy
Peter J. Brown and Elizabeth D. Whitaker
25. Ecology and Ethnomedicine: Exploring Links between Current Environmental Crisis and Indigenous Medical Practices
Charles Anyinam
PART THREE: Culture-Oriented Approaches

Concepts and Perspectives

26. Cultural Meaning, Explanations of Illness, and the Development of Comparative Frameworks
Linda C. Garro
27. The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock
Mind-Body-Universe

28. Breast Cancer: Reading the Omens
Margaret Lock
29. Refugee Stress and Folk Belief: Hmong Sudden Deaths
Shelley R. Adler
30. Deconstructing the Placebo Effect and Finding the Meaning Response
Daniel E. Moerman and Wayne B. Jonas
31. Possible Efficacy of a Creek Folk Medicine through Skin Absorption: An Object Lesson in Ethnopharmacology
Michelle M. Alexander and J. Anthony Paredes
Explanatory Models and Social and Politico-Economic Contexts

32. Cultural Contexts of Ebola in Northern Uganda
Barry S. Hewlett and Richard P. Amola
33. Health Beliefs and Folk Models of Diabetes in British Bangladeshis: A Qualitative Study
Trisha Greenhalgh, Cecil Helman, and A. Mu'min Chowdhury
34. Social Scientists and the "New" Tuberculosis
Paul Farmer
35. Embodiment of Terror: Gendered Violence in Peacetime and Wartime in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina
Maria B. Olujic
Stigma

36. Immigrants from Chernobyl-Affected Areas in Israel: The Link between Health and Social Adjustment
L.I. Remennick
37. Partner Notification in Context: Swedish and Zambian Experiences
Elisabeth A. Faxelid and Kristina M. Ramstedt
38. Erasmus, Syphilis, and the Abuse of Stigma
Christopher J.M. Whitty
Race and Racism

39. Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care
Vanessa Northington Gamble
40. Does Racism Harm Health? Did Child Abuse Exist before 1962? On Explicit Questions, Critical Science, and Current Controversies: An Ecosocial Perspective
Nancy Krieger
41. Getting the Numbers Right: Statistical Mischief and Racial Profiling in Heart Failure Research
Jonathan Kahn
PART FOUR: Special Topics and Case Studies

Contrasting Perspectives on Metabolic Disorders

42. The Double Puzzle of Diabetes
Jared Diamond
43. Ethics, Epidemiology and the Thrifty Gene: Biological Determinism as a Health Hazard
Robyn McDermott
Food and Food Use

44. Eating Dirt
Gerald N. Callahan
45. Using Drug Foods to Capture and Enhance Labor Performance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
William Jankowiak and Dan Bradburd
46. The State of Mind of Vegetarians: Psychological Well-Being or Distress?
Marjaana Lindeman
Infant and Child Health

47. Breastfeeding, Breast Cancer, and the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Anthropological Perspective
Elizabeth D. Whitaker
48. Growth in Indigenous and Nonindigenous Chilean Schoolchildren from Three Poverty Strata
Patricia Bustos, Hugh Amigo, Sergio R. Muñoz, and Reynaldo Martorell
Sex and Gender

49. Genders, Sexes, and Health: What Are the Connections, and Why Does It Matter?
Nancy Krieger
50. Female-Selective Abortion in Asia: Patterns, Policies, and Debates
Barbara D. Miller
51. Women from Polygamous and Monogamous Marriages in an Out-Patient Psychiatric Clinic
Alean Al-Krenawi
52. "The Worst Hassle Is You Can't Play Rugby": Haemophilia and Masculinity in New Zealand
Julie Park
53. Doing Gender, Doing Surgery: Women Surgeons in a Man's Profession
Joan Cassell
Biotechnology and Bioethics

54. The Cow Tipping Point
David Ehrenfeld
55. Keeping an Eye on the Global Traffic in Human Organs
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
56. Therapeutic and Reproductive Cloning: A Critique
Finn Bowring