AAA 2014: Sessions on Psychiatry, Mental Illness, and Drugs

Posted by jknopes

For our readers attending the American Anthropological Association annual meeting this year, we’re featuring a list of sessions sure to pique your interest in various aspects of mental illness, health, drugs, and psychiatric care. The following selection of sessions was drawn from this year’s AAA online presentation schedule for the 2014 annual meeting, to be held this year in Washington, DC from December 3-7th (for more information, click here: http://www.aaanet.org/meetings). Sessions in the list are organized by chronological date and time.

If you would like your session to be added to this list, please email a link to the session description on the AAA website to: jcb193@case.edu.

Global Mental Healthcare: Challenges, Controversies and Innovations

Wednesday, December 3rd 2pm-3:45pm

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session12926.html

“Global” Knowledge, “Local” Care, and Subjectivity: Producing an Anthropology of Psychosis

Wednesday, December 3rd 2pm-3:45pm

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session11392.html

Psyche and the Brain in the 21st Century

Wednesday, December 3rd 4pm-5:45pm

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session11636.html

Transcendance and the Everyday in Responses to Trauma

Thursday, December 4th 2:30-4:15pm

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session11838.html

What Drugs Produce

Saturday, December 6th 9am-10:45am

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session11124.html

Psychological Disorder and Subjectivity in Socio-Political Context

Saturday, December 6th 11am-12:45pm

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session12768.html

Ordering, Morality and Triage: Producing Medical Anthropology Beyond the Suffering Subject Part 2: Mental Health and Illness

Saturday, December 6th 2:30pm-4:15pm

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session11809.html

Professional Perspectives in the Anthropology of Drugs

Saturday, December 6th 6:30pm-8:15pm

http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2014/webprogram/Session11263.html

Publication Highlight: “Online First” Articles (Oct 2014), Part Two

Posted by jknopes

Welcome to the second installment of this series. The following collection of articles are from our “Online First” file at our publisher’s website: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013. The full text of these articles will be released in upcoming issues of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, but here we’d like to lend our readers a glimpse into the innovative research in medical anthropology and social medicine that the journal publishes.

Clicking the title of each paper will send you to the “Online First” page for each article, including a full list of authors and abstracts.

Confinement and Psychiatric Care: A Comparison Between High-Security Units for Prisoners and for Difficult Patients in France

Livia Velpry & Benoît Eyraud

Learning Constraint. Exploring Nurses’ Narratives of Psychiatric Work in the Early Years of French Community Psychiatry

Nicolas Henckes

The Ethics of Ambivalence and the Practice of Constraint in US Psychiatry

Paul Brodwin

Between Jewish Settlers and Palestinian Citizens of Israel: Negotiating Ethno-national Power Relations Through the Discourse of PTSD

Keren Friedman-Peleg

Book Release: Paul Stoller’s “Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World”

Posted by jknopes

Image from UC Press website

Out this month from the University of Chicago Press is Paul Stoller’s book Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World. The text traces the author’s friendship with a Songhay trader from Niger named Yaya Harouna: a man who moved to the United States as Stoller, an anthropologist, had likewise made a journey from the USA to Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. Their story begins whenever Stoller meets Yaya selling artwork in an African market in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, where Stoller carried out research.

Although the men’s histories are markedly different, they become close after the two are each diagnosed with cancer: this serves as the heart of Yaya’s Story, and the experience upon which the two men’s culturally divergent, yet not entirely dissimilar, narratives cross paths. With extensive publications in the genres of both ethnography and memoir, Stoller is certain to blend keen anthropological insight with deeply personal accounts of human suffering, endurance, and resilience in the face of illness across cultures in his latest book.

Stoller, Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University, is a 1994 winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology from the King of Sweden.

You can find out more about the book here, at the UC Press website:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/Y/bo18882897.html

From the Archive: Biomedicine, Chinese Medicine, and Psychiatry

Posted by jknopes

In the “From the Archive” series, we will highlight articles published throughout the journal’s history. We look forward to sharing with our readers these samples of the innovative research that CMP has published on the cultural life of medicine across the globe.

At the journal, we often present fascinating work on psychiatric care throughout the world, including Joshua Breslau’s 2001 article “Pathways through the Border of Biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Meeting of Medical Systems in a Japanese Psychiatry Department” (volume 25 issue 3.)

In this piece, Breslau recounts stories of the two medical systems interacting during a meeting of clinicians employing, to varying degrees, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) alongside biomedical interventions within a Japanese psychiatric department. The author asserts that Japan is perhaps the most common ground for the two medical systems to meet, and that it represents the “traffic” of medical knowledge between Japan, the Asiatic mainland, and the rest of the world. Indeed, Japan has had a lengthy history of exchange with foreign medical systems,beginning with the 18th-century import of anatomy textbooks from Holland. Combined with expanded trade with “the West” in the 19th century and the later resurgence of local Japanese interest in Chinese herbal remedies during the 1970s, we see that the two medical systems have both held a prominent position in the dynamic medical landscape in Japan.

Breslau observes that the two medical systems complement one another most strikingly in psychiatry, where kanpo (herbal treatments) are used both to diminish the uncomfortable side effects of psychoactive medications and to treat conditions for which there are few biomedical interventions. Exemplifying this blended approach to care, the author notes that Dr. Nakai, professor of psychiatry at Kobe University, examines the tongue to diagnose his patients. This method of diagnosis has its roots in TCM, and was taught to Dr. Nakai from a visiting Chinese student; many such Chinese students, having studied TCM, go to Japan to learn “Western medicine.” Although there is little formal education in TCM available in Japan, these interpersonal (and intercultural) exchanges are important mechanisms for sharing diverse medical techniques.

Another physician, Dr. Song, initially specialized in the use of acupuncture to treat psychiatric patients in China. Breslau theorizes that although it seems anomalous for traditional medicine to find a niche in conditions that generally fall under the scope of biomedicine, Dr. Song’s work is a productive blend of psychiatric treatments from both medical systems. Whereas patients in the Chinese biomedical settings were admitted alone, patients and their families stayed together in the TCM centers for mental health, thereby offering a support network that the biomedical patients lacked. In Japan, Dr. Song combined TCM and biomedical approaches. She established an “open ward” psychiatric unit that welcomed patients and their families, and employed both pharmaceutical and herbal remedies depending on the severity and the stage of psychiatric distress suffered by the patient.

Breslau’s piece reminds us of the complicated ways in which cultures are in contact with one another. Rather than reading medicine in China and Japan as a contest, where biomedicine and traditional Chinese medicine are at odds in the race to be deemed “most effective,” it is more accurate to describe the ways that the systems are in dialogue– often in the same clinical settings.

You can find the contents of the full issue in which Breslau’s article is published here: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013/25/3/page/1

Current Issue: Preview of Books Received, Part Two

Posted by jknopes

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.

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.

News: Must-See Medical Museums in the USA

Posted by jknopes

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.