The Taste For Knowledge

The anthology emerged from a 2008 international conference in Denmark of the Medical Anthropology At Home association, the members of which conduct research in their own culture and society. Seven papers look at medical anthropology as an academic field in relation to other sciences in practical interdisciplinary work; another seven consider the situation in society, with new medical realities and changing medical systems. Among the topics are whether physicians and psychiatrists should also be ethnographers, anthropological perspectives on the biomedically defined problems of patient delay, healing and recovering as a social process among patients with medically unexplained symptoms, and confronting the new medical realities of a hospitalized end of life. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)