Biomedicine and Medical Anthropology

Paper Summary:

This paper begins by analysing the creation of medicine as a bounded system. A bounded system is one circumscribed from the rest of the world, where cultural elements of patient?s symptoms are treated only as indicators of biological and empirical fact. It looks at how medical anthropology, by revealing the cultural framework and social networks that mediate and relate to medical discourse, removes medicine from its position as a bounded system. It attempts to emphasise how this task is inter-dependent with that of understanding medicine as several kinds of enterprise. It also examines the multiplicity of other forms of medical knowledge in the world.

From the Paper:

"There is a great deal of difficulty in understanding medicine in the way one would understand other anthropological phenomenon. As Good (1994:2) notes ?disease is paradigmatically biological; it is what we mean by Nature and its impingement on our lives.? Yet, disease is also culturally constituted, as ethnographic examples later will demonstrate. A further difficulty is that by emphasising the social and cultural aspects of biomedicine, there is a risk of caricature; people will assume by revealing biomedicines construction as a category we mean to deny biomedicine's great uses. Indeed, the seemingly all-powerful status of biomedicine, its rapid spread and advancement, constitutes one of the greatest boundaries to appreciating its cultural construction."

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