Social Lives of Medicines (Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, Series Number 10) - Softcover

Whyte, Susan Reynolds; Van Der Geest, Sjaak; Hardon, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521804698 ISBN 13: 9780521804691

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Synopsis

The focus of this book is medicines (swallowed, injected, rubbed on), as understood by anthropologists concerned solely with their social uses. The text begins with examples of a mother medicating a child in various cultural contexts and ends with a broad review of the complex elements that determine the production and use of medicines. Since 1993, Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology has offered researchers and instructors monographs and edited collections of leading scholarship in one of the most lively and popular subfields of cultural and social anthropology. Beginning in 2002, the CSMA series presents theme booksworks that synthesize emerging scholarship from relatively new subfields or that reinterpret the literature of older ones. Designed as course material for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and for professionals in related areas (physicians, nurses, public health workers, and medical sociologists), these theme books will demonstrate how work in medical anthropology is carried out and convey the importance of a given topic for a wide variety of readers. About 160 pages in length, the theme books are not simply staid reviews of the literature. They are, instead, new ways of conceptualizing topics in medical anthropology that take advantage of current research and the growing edges of the field.

About this title

Book Description:

The focus of this book is medicines--the things that are actually swallowed, injected, rubbed on, and understood by anthropologists concerned not with their efficacy but with their means and social uses. The authors treat the subject in a broad comparative fashion understood situationally. The aim is to provide coherent narratives, beginning with simply examples of a mother medicating a child in various cultural contexts and ending with a broad review of all the interests and specialisms that now combine to determine the production and the use of medicines.

About the Author:

Susan Reynolds Whyte is Professor at the Institute of Anthropology of the University of Copenhagen.

Sjaak van der Geest is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam.

Anita Hardon is Professor and Director of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0521804698
• ISBN 13: 9780521804691
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212