MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: WHAT IT STUDIES, HISTORY, SYSTEMS - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

The medical anthropology, medical anthropology, anthropology of health or disease anthropology is a subfield of physical anthropology investigating the origin of diseases in society.

His research consists of ethnographic studies based on observations and where he interacts with people through interviews or questionnaires. These studies determine how a community perceives certain diseases and how society, politics and the environment affect its health.

What do you study?

Medical anthropology studies how diseases arise in society, using the perspective of medical ecology to understand the disease patterns of human populations as biological and cultural entities.

In anthropology, adaptation is a key term. Changes and modifications affect the chances of survival, reproduction and well-being.

Applied to medical anthropology, humans adapt thanks to genetic change, physiologically and with cultural knowledge and practices.

History of medical anthropology

The origin of the name comes from the Dutch medische anthropologie created by the historian philosopher Pedro Laín Entralgo, who mentions it in several of his works during the 19th century.

During 1978, the anthropologists George M. Foster and Barbara Gallatin Anderson, traced the development of medical anthropology in four main directions: human evolution and its adaptation, ethnographic interest in primitive medicine, studies of psychiatric phenomena in the school of culture, and personality, and anthropological work in international health.

Beginning in 1940, anthropologists helped understand the health behavior of peoples by analyzing cultural differences.

One of the first texts in medical anthropology was Culture and Community: Case Studies of Public Reactions to Health Programs (1955), written by Benjamin D. Paufs Salud.

Scholars, applied scientists, and clinicians worked hard in the 1960s to organize the emerging social sciences in the medical movement at the national meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SFAA). in English).

William Caudill (1953) was the first to identify the field, followed by review articles by Steven Polgar (1962) and by Norman Scotch (1963).

Systems of medical anthropology

Each culture has its own concepts of specific diseases and treatments. This body of knowledge is called medical systems. The best known are folk medicine, indigenous medicine and biomedicine, and they apply to medical anthropology.

These systems are divided into externalized system and internalized system. People often use both systems to improve their health. In many cases, the outsourced system, self-medication or home remedies are preferred, due to their low costs.

Outsourced system

The externalized systems are known as ethnomedical systems and they state that the body is influenced by society, the spiritual world and nature, since it is an open system.

Folk medicine, indigenous, traditional Chinese systems, and Indian medicine are outsourced systems.

Folk medicine

The concept of folk medicine, traditional or folk, was introduced in the middle of the 20th century by physicians and anthropologists. This describes the ways and resources that the peasants used to solve health problems.

These methods were outside the scope of health professionals or Aboriginal practices. Popular therapeutic rituals are also taken into account in order to determine the relationship between science and religion.

Internalized system

The internalized system is mechanistic, as its approach is to fix what is damaged. Within this system is biomedicine.

Biomedicine

Biomedicine has its origins in the internalized system, since while society grew in complexity, the need arose to create medical specializations that made it the externalized system.

Also known as Western medicine, biomedicine is the scientific and universal medicine, which predominates in modern society. It works through hospitals and clinics.

It is considered as a medical system and as a cultural form, since in a debate with medicine and psychiatry the following is considered:

• Influence of genotypic and phenotypic factors in relation to pathologies.
• Influence of culture in determining what is considered normal or abnormal.
• Identification and description of specific diseases that have not been scientifically defined. For example, ethnic disorders and culturally delimited syndromes such as the evil eye, which have not been scientifically proven.

What is a disease according to medical anthropology?

Understood by medical anthropologists, a disease has a semantic nature and therefore, any practice that intends to cure it will be interpretive. Every culture in the world has its own explanation for disease.

The concept of semantic disease network refers to the network of words, situations, symptoms and feelings associated with a disease that give it meaning for the sufferer. Also, it is common to understand from medical anthropology that diseases are individual processes.

Similarly, any information about a disease must be modified over time according to the historical and social context in which it develops.

Culturally specific syndromes

Culturally specific syndromes are diseases that cannot be understood without their cultural context. As a result, medical anthropology studies the origin of these supposed ailments and what have been the ways of dealing with it for centuries.

In principle, in the 50s it was known as Folk Illness and it referred to the annoyances that had the same origin, affected an individual frequently and always developed in the same way.

A very popular example in Central and South America is the "scare", whose symptoms could be loss of appetite, energy, paleness, depression, vomiting, anxiety, diarrhea and even death. According to each community, the curandero looked for the ideal remedy.

The cause of this syndrome, for some Latin American peoples, was the loss of the soul. To recover it, the patient had to undergo healing rituals.

References

1. Arenas, P., Ladio, A. and Pochettino, M. (2010). Traditions & transformations in Ethnobotany. The "scare": "culturally specific syndrome" in multicultural contexts. Some considerations about its etiology and therapy in Mexico and Argentina. CYTED Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum, Argentina. Recovered from naturalis.fcnym.unlp.edu.ar
2. Baer, ​​H. and Singer, M. (2007). Introducing medical anthropology: A discipline in action. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Recovered from books.google.co.ve
3. Levinson, D. and Ember, M. (1996) Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. Henry Holt, New York. Recovered from web.archive.org
4. Greifeld, K. (2004). Concepts in Medical Anthropology: Culturally Specific Syndromes and the Balance of Elements System. Anthropology Bulletin, Universidad de Antioquia, 18 (35), 361-375. Recovered from redalyc.org
5. Menéndez, E. (1985). Critical approach to the development of medical anthropology in Latin America. New Anthropology, VII (28), 11-28. Recovered from redalyc.org