Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн
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Nancy Romero-Daza
Barbara Rylko-Bauer
Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet
Sandy Smith-Nonini
Merrill Singer
Elisa (E. J.) Sobo
Patricia K. Townsend
Robert T. Trotter, II
E. Christian Wells
Linda M. Whiteford
Introduction
Merrill Singer, Pamela I. Erickson, and César Abadía-Barrero
Medical Anthropology is a “baby boomer” of sorts. It came into being alongside the unprecedented interest in the health and wellbeing of Third World peoples in the aftermath of WWII when the world was full of the hope and possibility that science, in this case biomedicine, could alleviate human suffering due to infectious disease and malnutrition, and then help eliminate or control many of the world’s major health problems. Many anthropologists of that era worked with the international health community (WHO, USAID, UNICEF, etc.) to bring biomedicine to the world. The presumption guiding this effort was that shown the effectiveness of biomedicine and modern public health methods (e.g., the health value of boiling water before drinking it), while addressing contextual and cultural barriers to change, people would readily adopt new ways and the threat of many diseases would begin to diminish. Seven decades later, a large proportion of the morbidity and mortality in our world is still due to the same tenacious problems of malnutrition, pregnancy-related complications, infectious diseases, and lack of access to high-quality health care. Although some of the diseases, like HIV/AIDS, are new, one old disease but only one, smallpox, has been eliminated. With economic development, the so-called Third World was re-branded in terms of the size of each country’s economy as low- or middle-income countries. With more “development,” these countries started to experience a mixed epidemiologic profile: “diseases of poverty,” on the one hand (Farmer 2003), and chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, on the other. The raising awareness of the world interconnectedness demonstrated how health profiles depended on key social determinants of global health such as living and working conditions; level of education; neighborhood characteristics; and access to water, sanitation, and health care services which are exacerbated by escalating levels of poverty, inequalities, war, genocide, and greed (Singer and Erickson 2013).