A companion to medical anthropology / edited by Merrill Singer, Pamela I. Erickson, C�esar E. Abad�ia-Barrero.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Re/inventing medical anthropology : definitional struggles and key debates (or: answering the "cri du coeur") / Elisa J. Sobo -- Critical biocultual approaches to health and illness / Tom Leatherman and Alan H. Goodman -- Applied medical anthropology : praxis, pragmatics, politics, and promises / Robert T. Trotter, II -- Research design and methods in medical anthropology / Clarence C. Gravlee -- Culture and the stress process / William W. Dressler -- Global health / Craig R. Janes, Jennifer A. Liu & Kitty K. Corbett -- Syndemics in global health / Merrill Singer & Emily Mendenhall -- The ecology of health and disease / Patricia K. Townsend -- The medical anthropology of water and sanitation / E. Christian Wells & Linda M. Whiteford -- Medical anthropology of political violence and war / Barbara Rylko-Bauer -- Medical anthropology at the end of life / Ron Barrett -- The anthropology of reproduction / Elise Andaya & Mounia El Kotni -- Anthropological approaches to migration and health / Heide Casta�neda -- Current approaches to nutritional health in medical anthropology / Deven Gray, David A Himmelgreen, Nancy Romero Daza & Charlotte Noble -- Cancers' multiplicities : anthropologies of interventions and care / Lenore Manderson -- Anthropology and the study of illicit drug use / J. Bryan Page -- Revisiting generation Rx : emerging trends in pharmaceutical enhancement, lifestyle regulation, self-medication, and recreational drug use / Gilbert Quintero & Mark Nichter -- Ethnomedicines / Marsha B. Quinlan -- Medical pluralism : an evolving and contested concept in medical anthropology / Hans A. Baer -- Biotechnologies of care / Ruth Fitzgerald & Julie Park -- Medicine : colonial, postcolonial, or decolonial? / C�esar E. Abad�ia-Barrero -- The politics of communicability / Charles L. Briggs -- When workers' health is public health : applying medical anthropology to analyze the structural complicity of state public health policies as COVID-19 spread in meat-processing plants and minority communities / Sandy Smith-Nonini -- Climate change and health : anthropology & beyond / Merrill Singer, Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet and Ashley L. Graham.

"Medical Anthropology is a "baby boomer" of sorts. It came into being alongside the unprecedented interest in the health and wellbeing of Third World peoples in the aftermath of WW II when the world was full of the hope and possibility that science, in this case biomedicine, could alleviate human suffering due to infectious disease and malnutrition, and then help eliminate or control many of the world's major health problems. Many anthropologists of that era worked with the international health community (WHO, USAID, UNICEF, etc.) to bring biomedicine to the world. The presumption guiding this effort was that shown the effectiveness of biomedicine and modern public health methods (e.g., the health value of boiling water before drinking it), while addressing contextual and cultural barriers to change, people would readily adopt new ways and the threat of many diseases would begin to diminish. Seven decades later, a large proportion of the morbidity and mortality in our world is still due to the same tenacious problems of malnutrition, pregnancy-related complications, infectious diseases, and lack of access to high-quality health care. Although some of the diseases, like HIV/AIDS, are new, one old disease but only one, smallpox, has been eliminated. With economic development, the so-called Third World was re-branded in terms of the size of each country's economy as low or middle income countries. With more "development," these countries started to experience a mixed epidemiologic profile: "diseases of poverty," on the one hand (Farmer, 2003), and chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, on the other. The raising awareness of the world interconnectedness demonstrated how health profiles depended on key social determinants of global health such as living and working conditions, level of education, neighborhood characteristics, and access to water, sanitation and health care services which are exacerbated by escalating levels of poverty, inequalities, war, genocide, and greed (Singer and Erickson, 2013)"-- Provided by publisher.

About the Author
Merrill Singer is Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Connecticut, as well as Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Health, Intervention and Prevention at the University of Connecticut and Affiliated Scientist in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale University. A respected and field-leading scholar in medical anthropology, he acted as editor on the first edition of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Anthropology with Pamela Erickson and has also authored and edited many other texts on medical anthropology, including the Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health.

Pamela Erickson is Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Connecticut. Her research is concerned with medical anthropology, maternal and child health, global health, and sexual and reproductive health of adolescents. With Merrill Singer, she acted as editor of the first edition of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Anthropology.

César Abadía-Barrero is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Connecticut. His research is focused on medical anthropology in Latin America as well as health and human rights, legal and moral issues in health, social science theory, and activist-oriented research.