Patients and healers in the context of culture

University of California Press

1980

XVI, 427, [1] p.

Comparative studies of health systems and medical care ; 3

ncludes index. Bibliography: p. 393-414

9780520045118

1. Orientations 1: The Problem, the Setting, and the Approach -- 2. Orientations 2: Culture, Health Care Systems, and Clinical Reality -- 3. Orientations 3: Core Clinical Functions and Explanatory Models -- 4. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 1: Affects and Symptoms in Chinese Culture -- 5. The Cultural Construction of Illness Experience and Behavior, 2: A Model of Somatization of Dysphoric Affects and Affective Disorders -- 6. Family-Based Popular Health Care -- 7. Patients and Healers: Transactions Between Explanatory Models and Clinical Realities. Part 1. Sacred Folk Healer-Client Relationships -- 8. Patients and Healers: Transactions Between Explanatory Models and Clinical Realities. Part 2: Professional Practitioner-Patient and Family-Patient Relationships -- 9. The Healing Process -- 10. Epilogue: Implications

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

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