British Medical Bulletin 69:1-7 (2004)
Oxford University Press
Preface |
Preface
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Cultures of health and illness have always been in existence, ever since the first human expressed the first symptoms of illness, and their first companion endeavoured to help or heal them. Groups of people, defined in social or geographical terms, developed patterns and processes of communicating, classifying and treating ill health. An ancient Egyptian had their particular beliefs and practices surrounding health and illness, as did Viking warriors and British Victorian women.
In terms of academic scholarship, the cultural aspects of health and illness were initially investigated by anthropologists, who intrepidly ventured from their ivory towers in the industrial world to observe the cultural practices of ‘primitive’ peoples in ‘exotic’ locations, returning to their colleges to write up their theoretical treatises. ‘Culture’ was from this viewpoint those aspects of different societies that emphasized their otherness from the home society1. This focus on cultural difference—together with sometimes explicit claims regarding
How this volume is organized