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Take, for example, hospital ethnography, which saw increased interest in the early 2000s. While those involved claimed that anthropologists were only just discovering the benefits of active research in hospital settings, Foster and Anderson devoted an entire chapter to hospitals in their 1978 textbook and included also a separate chapter on doctors and another on nurses. “Some of the most important studies of hospitals have been done by anthropologists,” they said (p. 164), such as one of the earliest behavioral science studies of nursing (this, in 1936). An early 1970s review of medical anthropology (Colson and Selby 1974) also provided a number of examples of this genre.

This is not to say that aims and approaches remain unchanged. Neither is it to deny that subtle differences can mean the world in terms of what publications contribute to the field, nor to ignore the heavy institutional pressures on scholars to stake claims of novel research (see Sobo et al. 2008). Yet a better grasp of the history of scholarship in a given topical area can support more efficient and effective theoretical advancement. Even this is not a new observation: It was in fact the point of many who, in the 1960s, took medical anthropology to task because “it has not been cumulative” (Scotch 1963, p. 39). Adding to the challenge today is medical anthropology’s success: It is a massive, noisy subdiscipline, whose various networks are not always or easily aware of each other, particularly when language barriers must be crossed (see Sailant and Genest 2007). Again, this problem is not new – but its significance has no doubt broadened as the field has grown.