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.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Springer
ISBN-13
9789027718815
eBay Product ID (ePID)
96409507
Product Key Features
Author
Atwood D. Gaines, Robert A. Hahn
Publication Name
Physicians of Western Medicine: Anthropological Approaches to Theory and Practice
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Subject
Medicine, Sociology, Anthropology
Publication Year
1984
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
345 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
235mm
Item Width
155mm
Volume
6
Item Weight
590g
Additional Product Features
Series Title
Culture, Illness and Healing
Editor
Atwood D. Gaines, Robert A. Hahn
Country/Region of Manufacture
Netherlands
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