Loustaunau and Sobo demonstrate the ways in which cultural and social factors shape medicine and health care. After a discussion of culture, the social structure and the impact of poverty, class, gender, and family patterns on health, illness and care-seeking, they explain the similarities and differences of medical systems cross-culturally. The authors call for a more flexible and culturally sensitive system of health care that expresses caring in more holistic ways, and offer examples as to how this might be accomplished in the increasingly multicultural USA.

"This is a comprehensive book focused on relevant factors that influence health, illness, and well-being from multi-discipline perspectives. It is a unique book to provide health leaders and consumers refreshing new ways to know and understand cultures. It is an essential book to serve cultures in creative and effective ways. The authors provide new and diverse cultural insights about health, illness, and wellness that have been woefully missing until the advent of transcultural nursing." Dr. Madeleine Leininger Professor of Nursing Emeritus, College of Nursing, Wayne State University --

This collection of papers – some of which written by the world’s leading specialists in the area of ancient medicine – aims at promoting an integrated approach to medical theory and practice in classical antiquity. Questions of health and disease are considered in their relation to the social, intellectual, moral and religious dimensions of the ancient world. The papers focus on the socio-cultural setting of the experience of pain and illness, the different reactions they provoked and the importance that was attached to this experience in literature, religion and philosophy. The first volume offers articles (from an archaeological, historical and philological point of view) dealing with social, institutional and geographical aspects of medical practice. It also has a special section on medical views on women, children and sexuality, and on female medical activity. The second volume focuses on the ways in which religious and magical beliefs influenced the experience of, and the attitude towards, illness and medical practice. It also deals with the relations of medicine with philosophy, and the other sciences and with the variety of linguistic and textual forms in which medical knowledge was expressed and communicated. Contributors to the first volume are Lawrence J. Bliquez, Simon Byl, Armelle Debru, Nancy Demand, Danielle Gourevitch, Ann Ellis Hanson, H.F.J. Horstmanshoff, Ralph Jackson, Eva C. Keuls, Jukka Korpela, Ernst Künzl, Gabriele Marasco, Attilio Mastrocinque, Karin Nijhuis, Vivian Nutton, H.W. Pleket, Heikki Solin, Peter Van Minnen, and Juliane C. Wilmanns.

From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement. I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980. From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered

Storytelling is an essential tool for reporting and illuminating the cultural contexts of health: the practices and behavior that groups of people share and that are defined by customs, language, and geography. This report reviews the literature on narrative research, offers some quality criteria for appraising it, and gives three detailed case examples: diet and nutrition, well-being, and mental health in refugees and asylum seekers. Storytelling and story interpretation belong to the humanistic disciplines and are not a pure science, although established techniques of social science can be applied to ensure rigor in sampling and data analysis. The case studies illustrate how narrative research can convey the individual experience of illness and well-being, thereby complementing and sometimes challenging epidemiological and public health evidence.

Culture, Health and Illness is the leading international textbook on the role of cultural and social factors in health, illness, and medical care. Since first published in 1984, it has been used in over 40 countries within universities, medical schools and nursing colleges. This new edition meets the ever-growing need for a clear starting point in

Medical practitioners and the ordinary citizen are becoming more aware that we need to understand cultural variation in medical belief and practice. The more we know how health and disease are managed in different cultures, the more we can recognize what is "culture bound" in our own medical belief and practice. The Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology is unique because it is the first reference work to describe the cultural practices relevant to health in the world's cultures and to provide an overview of important topics in medical anthropology. No other single reference work comes close to marching the depth and breadth of information on the varying cultural background of health and illness around the world. More than 100 experts - anthropologists and other social scientists - have contributed their firsthand experience of medical cultures from around the world.

Culture, Health and Illness: An Introduction for Health Professionals, Second edition discusses the fundamentals of medical anthropology. The book is comprised of 12 chapters that present both the theoretical framework and case histories relevant to the topic. The coverage of the text includes the relationship of culture to various health related concepts, such as pain, pharmacology, stress, and epidemiology. The book also discusses the doctor-patient relation, the various sectors of health care, and the scope of medical anthropology. The text will be of great use to professionals in health related fields. Researchers and practitioners of anthropology, sociology, and psychology will also benefit from this book.

A "one size fits all" approach to health care doesn't work well, especially for America's extremely diverse population. This book provides a lively and accessible discussion of how and why a more flexible and culturally sensitive system of health care can—and must be—achieved. Notable anthropologist George Foster defined the first edition as "a very readable introductory text dealing with the sociocultural aspects of health," adding: "[T]he authors do a commendable job... . I have profited from reading The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine". With engaging examples, minimal jargon, and updated scholarship, the second edition of The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine offers a comprehensive guide to the practice of culturally sensitive health care. Readers will see America's biomedically dominated health care system in a new light as the book reveals the changes wrought by increasing cultural diversity, technological innovation, and developments in care delivery. Written by a sociologist and an anthropologist with direct, hands-on experience in the health services, the volume tracks culture's influence on and relationship to health, illness, and health-care delivery via an examination of social structure, medical systems, and the need for—and challenges to—culturally sensitive care. Cultural differences are situated against social-class differences and related health inequities, as well as different needs and challenges throughout the life course. In prescribing caring that is more holistic, culturally sensitive, and cost-effective, the work promotes awareness of pressing issues for health care professionals—and the people they serve.

In August, 1985, the 2nd International Conference on Illness Behaviour was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The first International Conference took place one year previous in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. This book is based on the proceedings of the second conference. The purpose behind this conference was to facilitate the development of a single integrated model to account for illness experience and presentation. A major focus of the conference was to outline methodological issues related to current behaviour research. A multidiscipl~nary approach was emphasized because of the bias that collaborative efforts are likely to be the most successful in achieving greater understanding of illness behaviour. Significant advances in our knowledge are occurring in all areas of the biological and social sciences, albeit more slowly in the latter areas. Marked specialization in each of these areas has lead to greater difficulty in integrating new knowledge with that of other areas and the development of a meaningful cohesive model to which all can relate. Thus there is a major need for forums such as that provided by this conference.