1. MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY COURSE
Dr. Perpetual Crentsil
Puh:/Tel.:

2. WHAT IS MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY?
It deals with illness affliction and healing in a cross-cultural perspective
Uses multiple theoretical approaches
Interaction of biology, social environment, medicine.

3. History of Medical Anthropology
Before 1950s, study of illness and healing was done within cultural/social studies
How other people dealt with sickness
Religion and medicine (religious life of a people).
Medical Anthropology developed in1960s & 1970s
Early medical anthropologists had training in medicine—WHR Rivers, Arthur Kleinman, Byron Good, etc.

4. What Medical Anthropology Does
Shows how an individual or group constructs social reality about health (Kleinman 1980)
Reveals illness and healing in both Western and non-Western societies

5. Variants of Medical Anthropology
Clinical or Biomedical Approach:
-Associated modern science
-Explains disease in physical or biological terms
* Biomedicine includes:
-physicians and health experts
-institutions of care
-industries and government/private agencies (Hahn 1995: 131).

6. Variants of Medical Anthropology
Medical Ecology:
-populations as biological,
-interactions among ecological systems & health
(McElroy & Townsend 1996)

7. Variants of Medical Anthropology
Applied Medical Anthropology:
-deals with intervention, prevention, and policy issues
-analyzes the socioeconomic forces and power differentials that influence access to healthcare

8. Variants of Medical Anthropology
Ethnomedical Approach:
-Deals with cultural systems of healing
cognitive aspects of illness and healing
personalistic, non-scientific or not empirically proven

9. Variants of Medical Anthropology
Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA)
-developed as a sub-discipline
-It seeks to move away from MA’s subordination to biomedicine (Singer & Baer 1995: 5)
-Employs a critical gaze of health, illness/disease, and healthcare through political economy.

10. References
HAHN, Robert A. (1995). Sickness and Healing: An Anthropological Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press.
KLEINMAN, Arthur (1980). Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
MCELROY, Ann & Patricia K. TOWNSEND (1979). Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective. Massachusetts: Duxbury Press.
SINGER, Merrill & Hans BAER (1995). Critical Medical Anthropology. New York: Baywood Publishing Company, Inc.