Overview

After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word) collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist, will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic, problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social, non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out, come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis­ course about mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the chapters that follow.

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9789027717900

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Reviews

'This book contains some excellent teaching materials for students in anthropology as well as medicine. For practioners of both disciplines, it will surely stimulate discussion about the nature of biomedicine and the ability of anthropology to comprehend it.' American Anthropology (December 1986) 'The authors of this collection are to be congratulated for making such an engaging contribution to the scholarly exploration of contemporary medicine. These essays will prove, I hope, a source of inspiration and a referencepoint for many more studies to come.' Social Science and Medicine, 24:9 (1987) 'These 12 articles by anthropologists break new ground in the area between medicine and social science in that all of the authors describe physicians at work. ...physicians are in for acute culture shock as they encounter familiar subjects portrayed from a different vantage point. ... Anthropologists will rightly consider this book a landmark volume and an impetus to future investigation in the new subspeciality of physician-watching.' Annals of Internal Medicine, 103:3 (1985)

'This book contains some excellent teaching materials for students in anthropology as well as medicine. For practioners of both disciplines, it will surely stimulate discussion about the nature of biomedicine and the ability of anthropology to comprehend it.' American Anthropology (December 1986) 'The authors of this collection are to be congratulated for making such an engaging contribution to the scholarly exploration of contemporary medicine. These essays will prove, I hope, a source of inspiration and a referencepoint for many more studies to come.' Social Science and Medicine, 24:9 (1987) 'These 12 articles by anthropologists break new ground in the area between medicine and social science in that all of the authors describe physicians at work. ...physicians are in for acute culture shock as they encounter familiar subjects portrayed from a different vantage point. ... Anthropologists will rightly consider this book a landmark volume and an impetus to future investigation in the new subspeciality of physician-watching.' Annals of Internal Medicine, 103:3 (1985)

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