Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture by Arthur Kleinman

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture by Arthur Kleinman

From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman:Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement. I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research.

Arthur Michael Kleinman, M.D. is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780520045118
ISBN 10	0520045114
Title	Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture
Author	Arthur Kleinman
Series	Comparative Studies Of Health Systems And Medical Care
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of California Press
Year published	1981-08-17
Number of pages	448
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.