Medical Anthropology

Current Issue: Preview of Books Received, Part Two

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In this special feature on the blog, we’re highlighting recent book publications that have been submitted for review to Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. This week, we are pleased to present a short overview of Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, a volume of works edited by Ruth J. Prince and Rebecca Marsland. This book addresses the experience of African public health initiatives from numerous vantage points. Published by the Ohio University Press, a paperback version was released in December 2013. You can learn more about the book here: http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Making+and+Unmaking+Public+Health+in+Africa.

Book cover image via the Ohio University Press website.

Book cover image via the Ohio University Press website.

Prince and Marsland’s edited collection was the result of a 2008 workshop at the University of Cambridge hosted by the Centre of African Studies and the Department of Social Anthropology. Africa has long served as an “arena” for discussions about global health, human rights, and humanitarian aid, but the notion of health-for-all is complicated against a backdrop of African state formation, international interventions, and transnational policies.

This text explores what public health means for clinical professionals, patients, government officials, and citizens throughout Africa. Instead of generalizing what the meaning of public health to these groups might be, this book aims to establish a rich, complex anthropology of African public health that weighs the importance of politics, culture, and local understanding to the definition and delivery of public health initiatives. The volume covers topics in numerous countries including Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania, and takes a blended historical-anthropological approach to studying public health.

These brief summaries are intended to give our readers a glimpse into the newest academic publications that we’re excited to discuss in our journal and with our followers on social media. For a full list of books that have been submitted for review at CMP, click this link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9383-x. This page also has information regarding the submissions process for authors who’d like their academic releases reviewed in the journal, as well as information for those interested in composing a review. For more information on this process, please contact managing editor Brandy Schillace.

Current Issue: Preview of Books Received, Part One

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In this special feature on the blog, we’re highlighting recent book publications that have been submitted for review to Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. This week, we’d like to give you a short overview of Sarah Pinto’s new book Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India, from the University of Pennsylvania Press (more information here: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15224.html)

Book cover image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press website

Book cover image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press website

Released earlier this year, Sarah Pinto’s book chronicles the experiences of women at a number of different psychiatric care institutions throughout Northern India. Pinto questions the poor treatment of female patients, the licensing process for mental health caregivers in these settings, as well as the overprescription of psychoactive medications to Indian women. Pinto pays close attention to the ways women in particular experience difficulty and distress as the primary caretakers of their families and households.

The goddess Parvati, whom the book is in part titled after, represents intense love for someone far away that borders on, and becomes, a form of suffering. Pinto invokes the name of this figure as a way to remind us of the mental strain that familial love can cause, especially for the Indian women at the heart of her moving ethnographic account.

These brief summaries are intended to give our readers a glimpse into the newest academic publications that we’re excited to discuss in our journal and with our followers on social media. For a full list of books that have been submitted for review at CMP, click this link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9383-x. This page also has information regarding the submissions process for authors who’d like their academic releases reviewed in the journal, as well as information for those interested in composing a review. For more information on this process, please contact managing editor Brandy Schillace.

Current Issue Highlight: September 2014 (Vol 38 Issue 3) Part Two

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Welcome back to our two-week special update featuring glimpses into some of the articles published in the latest release of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. These brief synopses of a few of our newest pieces from the September 2014 issue are only some of the publications that the current issue has to offer. We hope they invite you to explore the many other fascinating articles housed in this issue and in past volumes of CMP.

Swapnaushadhi: The Embedded Logic of Dreams and Medical Innovation in Bengal
Projit Bihari Mukharji

Mukharji’s article discusses the prevalent but little-researched history of indigenous therapeutic practices in Bengal that stem from therapies revealed in healers through dreams. Instead of grouping this practice into the indiscriminate category of “indigenous practice” or “dream culture,” the author asserts that all dream cultures are locally specific. They also do not draw stringent religious boundaries, as healers (and their patients) may receive visions of divine figures like Jesus or Muhammed despite not being of the creed the prophet represents. Because of this cross-cultural and “borderless” dialogue, medical innovation in dream medicine occurs regularly as the product of contact between numerous religious, spiritual, and local traditions. As Mukharji argues, “the logic of dreams opens up a space: the swapna-sthana or the dreamland where such cross-boundary transactions can take place without undermining the sanctity of the boundary itself in everyday social life.”

‘‘Pensando Mucho’’ (‘‘Thinking Too Much’’): Embodied Distress Among Grandmothers in Nicaraguan Transnational Families
Kristin Elizabeth Yarris

Yarris chronicles the difficulties faced by Nicaraguan grandmothers serving as the primary caregivers of grandchildren whose mothers have migrated to another country for employment. The author asks us to reconsider the simplistic mind-body connection in lieu of a more complicated view of the body and mind as experiencing distress: physical, emotional, and cultural all at once. In this paper, we discover that the term “thinking too much” ultimately describes the difficult self-sacrifice faced by grandmothers who tend to their grandchildren to allow their own children to succeed elsewhere. The stress of geographically dispersed and fractured families, the burden of caregiving later in life, and anxieties surrounding the grandmothers’ “hopes for the future” generate a particular form of psychosomatic suffering connected to broader economic, social, and political pressures manifested at the local level among these Nicaraguan families.

Current Issue Highlight: September 2014 (Vol 38 Issue 3) Part One

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Welcome back to the CMP blog! For the next two weeks we will post short descriptions of our newest articles from September 2014, which includes a special section addressing medical learning in South Asia as well as other thought-provoking pieces in the cultural construction of medicine, health, and illness. These updates are intended to offer a taste of the research we’re excited to share with you through the journal.

Knowledge and Skill in Motion: Layers of Tibetan Medical Education in India
Laurent Pordié & Calum Blaikie

In this article, the authors discuss the various ways that a student can be trained in Tibetan medical practice. They argue that there is not one means of medical training for Tibetan medicine, but rather numerous means of learning that alter the way the Tibetan practitioners learn and deliver medical care. In particular, three means of learning are highlighted: traditional apprenticeship under a Tibetan medical caregiver, classroom learning through a Buddhist institute, and lastly at a Tibetan medical organization intended to educate future practitioners from poorer rural regions with fewer resources than those attending the elite Buddhist school. The argument weighs the prestige and the social acceptance of each methods of training, noting that “institutionalisation tends to relegate ‘traditional training’ to an inferior level, in particular due to its heterogeneity and the social image of rural backwardness it presents.” It also addresses how different forms of learning are legitimated by the government and local authorities, and demonstrates the shift from skill-based learning via apprenticeship towards formal, institutional learning that emphasizes education over “enskillment.”

Of Shifting Economies and Making Ends Meet: The Changing Role of the Accompagnant at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal
Katie Kilroy-Marac

Kilroy-Marac draws from her ethnographic research in Senegal to offer a vivid picture of the shift in the role of the accompagnant, an attendant who stays with mental health patients for the duration of their hospitalization. Although this attendant was in previous generations a family member of the patient, there has been a sudden rise in professional accompagnants who are paid to stay with the patient at the clinic. The author notes that the “neoliberal turn” in Senegal towards increased wealth and commodification of services is exemplified in the professional accompagnant, whose services form a monetary transaction in lieu of fulfilling a familial duty to the patient: providing work for others and freeing up families who, in the newly-bolstered economy, often have other career and personal obligations. However, the author complicates this notion by noting how much the families cherish the attendant’s work and offer them gifts outside of typical payment agreements, and how these connections can often be special between families and the accompagnants.

News: “Uncontacted” Tribes Emerge in Brazil

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As reported by the BBC, the Brazilian organization FUNAI (which handles affairs of indigenous people within the country) released a statement on July 1st 2014 stating that seven members of an isolated tribe entered a village on the Peruvian border and made “peaceful contact” with the locals.[i] The group has been referred to in news media as an “uncontacted” tribe because of its formerly limited interaction with settled society outside of the Amazon rainforest, where the group makes its home.

This image of two members of the tribe was released by the Brazilian organization FUNAI.

This image of two members of the tribe was released by the Brazilian organization FUNAI.

The reemergence of this tribal group proves to be a source of enlivening discussion for scholars of the culture of medicine. The American Association for the Advancement of Science—the organization behind the journal Science—published a news piece that the tribal people “first exhibited flu symptoms on 30 June, 3 days after their first meeting with government officials in the Brazilian village of Simpatia.”[ii] After returning to the town, the article notes, the group was met by a medical team who administered flu vaccines and held them for six days at a treatment facility. They hoped to stop the disease from being transmitted to fellow members of the tribe, who due to infrequent contact with the villagers, could lack established immune defenses against the illness.

Another piece from Forbes news describes this interaction in further detail. “Doctors were flown in to the remote village and were able to talk to the nomads through an interpreter who knew a similar language, persuading them to take medicine that helped them to recover before they went home to their people,” the piece explained.[iii] The author also cites Carlos Travassos of the FUNAI organization, who remarked that, “at first [the tribal people] were afraid and wary, but thankfully in the end they understood, believed us, trusted the medical team and accepted the medicine…it was a difficult and slow dialogue.” The case therefore highlights the cross-cultural impact of medical treatment and the possible problems of delivering care that is non-native to the patients.

This news invites us to revisit postcolonial theory and to weigh the relationship between the settled, modernized world with that of local natives who have sustained their lifestyle alongside globalized societies which they come into contact with. It also suggests that the notion of the exotic “other,” and romanticizing of tribal life, remain objects worthy of introspection and critical interest.

 

[i] Newar, Rachel. (August 4 2014). Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes. BBC News. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140804-sad-truth-of-uncontacted-tribes

 

[ii] Pringle, Heather. (July 25 2014). Did Brazil’s uncontacted tribe receive proper medical care? American Association for the Advancement of Science News. http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/07/did-brazils-uncontacted-tribe-receive-proper-medical-care

 

[iii] Rodgers, Paul. (July 20 2014). Indians Emerge From Jungle, Catch Deadly Flu. Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrodgers/2014/07/20/indians-emerge-from-jungle-catch-deadly-flu/

Upcoming at CMP

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The Many “Lives” of a Journal

Atwood D. Gaines and Brandy Schillace

As with most journals, CMP began as a print only entity, distributed by means of the traditional post. Over time, the journal entered the digital age and developed a non-print life. Now the vast majority of CMP’s subscriptions are digital and downloads of the Journal’s articles surpass 60,000 per year. And now, we happily include this blog as one of the journal’s “lives.”

Increasingly, we rely on the interconnectivity that digital platforms provide. The real-time dissemination through Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere are now facts of life are the new more rapid means of communication and contact. The CMP blog and its linked social media platforms (@CMPjournal and FaceBook) will provide insights from a millennial medical anthropology that synthesizes medical anthropology and other medical social sciences, medical history, bioethics and medical humanities. Additionally, the website facilitates easier and more direct access to submission requirements, news, and updates (and links to our issues on SpringerLink). The present issue, which features a special section, demonstrates another way CMP seeks flexibility, and offers specific guidelines for the various categories of submissions with each appearing as pages on the site.

Due to the success of the Journal over the last seven years, we now welcome some three to four times the submissions that CMP received at the start of the tenure of the present Editor-in-Chief (mid 2007). As a consequence, CMP has been moved to streamline our double-blind peer-reviewed submission process by migrating to an online tracking system. At the same time, however, we are interested in preserving personal contact with our authors and recognize the impersonality and other problems with the vagaries of digital interaction. Thus, the Managing Editor, (Dr) Brandy Schillace, will remain the primary contact for CMP. She is reachable via email, and CMP’s editorial staff will continue to guide authors through the process of submission (and resubmission).

The major changes for CMP will be its acquisition of new “lives” on the internet and in the blogosphere. This online presence will increase the Journal’s availability to our audience and authors and will also provide additional essays and invited guest posts during and between published numbers of the Journal. If you are interested in submitting to the blog (which is separate from the journal’s double-blind submission process), please contact Julia Balacko or tweet to @CMPjournal.

As we have for the last seven years, CMP will continue to engage innovative iterations of the social sciences of medicine and the medical, medical history, narratology and medical ethics and doubtless new aspects of each of these fields which the Journals seeks to synthesize and to present without boundaries or demarcations.

 

ABOUT THE BLOGGER

Atwood Gaines is Editor in Chief of CMP, Brandy Schillace is Managing Editor. Read more on the About page or the Editorial Board.

News: Must-See Medical Museums in the USA

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Boston, MA

The Warren Anatomical Museum in partnership with Harvard University contains the skeletal remains and the infamous tamping iron of Phineas Gage, as well as phrenological casts and other objects in the history of the study of the human body.

The Public Health Museum is located on the grounds of the former Tewksbury Hospital, and features exhibits on the development of public health in history.

Chicago, IL

The International Museum of Surgical Science, located on the shores of Lake Michigan just north of “The Magnificent Mile,” is a collection of surgical instruments, medical artifacts, and displays on the history of anatomical and surgical learning housed in a beautifully restored former mansion.

The Museum of Science and Industry in the Hyde Park neighborhood is an enormous building which houses not only a permanent collection of plastinated and preserved cadaveric specimens, but features many exhibits on human health, the body, and other areas of scientific and industrial development.

Cleveland, OH

The Dittrick Museum of Medical History houses a newly-renovated exhibit on medical instruments and devices, as well as the Percy Skuy Collection of artifacts in the history of contraception and abortion. It also features exhibitions on the history of birth and on medical practice in the Cleveland area.

Danville, KY

The McDowell House Museum is the restored home and office of Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who for the first time in history in 1809 successfully removed an ovarian tumor. The museum features a collection of early medical equipment in the USA, gardens, and a recreated 19th century apothecary.

Houston, TX

The Health Museum features a series of interactive exhibits about the human body and disease, with rotating exhibitions on various aspects of biomedical technology and science. It is a family-friendly destination if you happen to be in town with little ones.

Indianapolis, IN

The Indiana Medical Museum can be found on the grounds of the former Central State Hospital, inside the old pathology building. The museum highlights the early history of biomedical psychiatry, and in its own words: “maintains a collection of scientific artifacts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a completely authentic setting. Constructed in 1895 and inaugurated in 1896, the nineteen-room Pathological Department Building, as it was then called, is equipped with three clinical laboratories, a photography lab, teaching amphitheatre, autopsy room, and library.”

Kirksville, MO

The Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University is the first museum dedicated to osteopathic care. It is home to an impressive collection of over 50,000 artifacts in the history of osteopathy, many from the founder of the field: Dr. Andrew T. Still, whose cabin is on the museum grounds.

New York, NY

The Morbid Anatomy Museum, newly opened by independent scholar Joanna Ebenstein, is located in Brooklyn. It features an array of exhibits on the intersections of death, art, and medicine, as well as a coffee café on the bottom level.

Philadelphia, PA

The Mütter Museum is a world-renowned collection of medical oddities and human pathological specimens, including (not for the faint of heart) the mummified body of a woman whose fat chemically decomposed into a soap-like material. The Mütter Museum has partnered with the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to offer a one-price two-museum admission ticket, if you wish to visit both institutions.

Rangley, ME

The Wilhelm Reich Museum, situated inside the former home and estate of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Wilhelm Reich, displays Dr. Reich’s collection of scientific devices and artwork. It also features a bookstore with the widest selection of his publications, as well as a conference center on the estate grounds.

Rochester, NY

The Rochester Medical Museum and Archive is located in the Rochester Academy of Medicine, and houses a collection of photos, articles, and vignettes on display that document the history of medicine in the Rochester area. The museum also features a climate-controlled storage area for clinical costumes and other artifacts in the history of medicine.

Washington, DC

The National Museum of Health and Medicine highlights not only the historical development of medicine in America, but the impact of medicine during important moments in American history, such as the Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

The NIH US National Library of Medicine, an impressive collection of medical books and artifacts, is open to the public.

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine features exhibits on medicine and care in the Civil War era, as well as highlighting the changing roles of women and medical professionals in the delivery of treatment at that time.

News: 2015 Conferences in Cultural Studies of Medicine and Medical Humanities

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The following is a list of conferences in 2015 with upcoming submission deadlines in the fall. If you are a conference organizer or have a conference you’d like to share in the fields of medical anthropology, medical humanities, or the social science of medicine, please email blog editor Julia Balacko at jcb193@case.edu with the location and date(s) of the conference, as well as submission deadlines. Conferences are listed by the date they will be held.

Medical Humanities for Drew University Transatlantic Connections Conference

January 14-18 2015 Donegal, Ireland

Deadline for submissions: Nov 1st 2014

Ageing Histories, Mythologies and Taboos: CFP Interdisciplinary Conference

University of Bergen, January 30th-31st 2015

Deadline for submissions: Sept 1st 2014

Vesalius and the Invention of the Modern Body

February 26-28th 2015

Washington University in St. Louis and Saint Louis University

(No submissions – invited speakers)

Playing Age (Anthropology and Gerontology)

University of Toronto, Feb. 27-28, 2015

Deadline for submissions: Sept 5th 2014

Medicine and Poetry: From the Greeks to the Enlightenment

March 20th, 2015 University of Miami Coral Gables, Florida

Deadline for abstracts: October 3rd, 2014

The Examined Life Conference: Writing, Humanities, and the Arts of Medicine

The University of Iowa, April 16th-18th 2015

(No submissions- workshop-based conference)

The American Association for the History of Medicine Conference

New Haven, CT, April 30th-May 3rd

Deadline for abstracts: Sept 26th 2014

Book Release: Stevenson’s “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic”

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Cover of Stevenson's book. Rights credited to UC Press.

Cover of Stevenson’s book. Rights credited to UC Press.

This August 2014, Margaret Elizabeth Stevenson’s book on death, illness, and the understanding of life among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic is set to be released by the University of California Press. The volume will explore two public health crises among the Inuit– a tuberculosis outbreak in the 1950s-60s as well as a suicide epidemic that began in the 1980s and extends into today. In these circumstances, Stevenson reports on how the Inuits cope with the death of their loved ones, realizing that what constitutes “life” is more than just the physical survival of the body.

To read the first chapter of the publication and find further details about Stevenson’s work, check out the page at the university press website here: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520282940

Welcome to the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Website

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From all of us on the CMP Journal editorial board, we’d like to extend a few opening words as we launch our new homepage.

This website will feature important information about the article submission process to the journal, as well as detail the newest installments of the journal’s current issue. It will also feature updates on the latest publications in the field of medical anthropology and allied work in the medical humanities, as well as current events that impact our understanding of human health and illness experience throughout the world today. More extensive blog posts exploring the cultural dimensions of medicine and health will be posted to this site as well, composed both by our blog administrator as well as guest writers.

It is our hope that the website will provide an active hub for scholarly work and contemporary trends in medical anthropology and the cultural study of medicine. We thank you for visiting our site and invite you to return for continued updates!

Best wishes,

Atwood Gaines, MA, MPH, PhD

Brandy Schillace, MA, PhD

Catherine Osborn, BA, BS

Stephanie McClure, MA, MPH, PhD

Ariel Casciso, BA, MA

Julia Balacko, MA (blog editor)