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Since its origins
in 1982 the Program in Medical Anthropology has supported a significant
part of the Department of Social Medicine's research, projects, training
programs and activities in public service.
Medical Anthropology
is the study of illness and medical systems cross-culturally. Through
analysis of social institutions, dynamics of social power and collective
meanings, faculty of the Program in Medical Anthropology describe how
medical knowledge and therapeutic action are differently distributed
across gender, age, ethnic and class lines, and how local forms of suffering
are constructed. Their work has contributed to understanding of the
cultural shaping of illness experiences for disorders from depression
and cancer to chronic pain and chronic fatigue syndrome. Faculty have
advanced empirical understanding of the social roots of tuberculosis,
AIDS and depression. In addition, faculty have contributed to basic
theory concerning issues such as illness narratives; the moral aspects
of suffering; the social course of disease; comparative cross-cultural
studies of medical systems; the social transformation of medical and
clinical practice; and bioethics.
The Medical Anthropology
Program's teaching activities link together the Department of Social
Medicine and the Department
of Anthropology and include courses for Harvard undergraduates,
graduate students, medical students and postdoctoral fellows. Topics
in medical anthropology are addressed in the first-year HMS course,
"Introduction to Social Medicine" and in the History, Science
and Technology course, "Global Health and Social Medicine"
as well as in the elective, "Medicine, Human Rights and the Physician."
The Friday
Morning Seminar has been a central feature of the Program in Medical
Anthropology. The seminar has met weekly since 1984, bringing together
faculty, fellows, graduate students and interested clinicians to explore
issues of culture and mental health.
The Program's research
and advocacy activities are organized in several programs including
the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change, Programs in Culture
and Mental Health and the Center for the Cultural Studies of Biomedicine.
Several of these programs are closely affiliated with the World Health
Organization. At present faculty are conducting research in Haiti, Peru,
Russia, Indonesia and China as well as in several communities in Boston,
New York, Chicago and elsewhere in the U.S.
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