This article's citation style may be unclear. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking. (October 2009)

Medical anthropology is an interdisciplinary field which studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation".^[1] It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives.^[2] It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology,^[3] and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.

The term "medical anthropology" has been used since 1963 as a label for empirical research and theoretical production by anthropologists into the social processes and cultural representations of health, illness and the nursing/care practices associated with these.^[4]

Furthermore, in Europe the terms "anthropology of medicine", "anthropology of health" and "anthropology of illness" have also been used, and "medical anthropology", was also a translation of the 19th century Dutch term "medische anthropologie". This term was chosen by some authors during the 1940s to refer to philosophical studies on health and illness.^[5]

Historical background[link]

The relationship between anthropology, medicine and medical practice is well documented.^[6] General anthropology occupied a notable position in the basic medical sciences (which correspond to those subjects commonly known as pre-clinical). However, medical education started to be restricted to the confines of the hospital as a consequence of the development of the clinical gaze and the confinement of patients in observational infirmaries.^[7][8] The hegemony of hospital clinical education and of experimental methodologies suggested by Claude Bernard relegate the value of the practitioners' everyday experience who was previously seen as a source of knowledge represented by the reports called medical geographies and medical topographies both based on ethnographic, demographic, statistical and sometimes epidemiological data. After the development of hospital clinical training the basic source of knowledge in medicine was experimental medicine in the hospital and laboratory, and these factors together meant that over time mostly doctors abandoned ethnography as a tool of knowledge. Most, not all because ethnography remained during a large part of the 20th century as a tool of knowledge in primary health care, rural medicine, and in international public health. The abandonment of ethnography by medicine happened when social anthropology adopted ethnography as one of the markers of its professional identity and started to depart from the initial project of general anthropology. The divergence of professional anthropology from medicine was never a complete split.^[9] The relationships between the two disciplines remained constant during the 20th century, until the development of modern medical anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s. A large number of contributors to 20th Century medical anthropology had their primary training in medicine, nursing, psychology or psychiatry, including W. H. R. Rivers, Abram Kardiner, Robert I. Levy, Jean Benoist, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and Arthur Kleinman. Some of them share clinical and anthropological roles. Others came from anthropology or social sciences, like George Foster, William Caudill, Byron Good, Tullio Seppilli, Gilles Bibeau, Lluis Mallart, Andràs Zempleni, Gilbert Lewis, Ronald Frankenberg, and Eduardo Menéndez. A recent book by Saillant & Genest describes a large international panorama of the development of medical anthropology, and some of the main theoretical and intellectual actual debates.^[10][11]

Popular medicine and medical systems[link]

For much of the 20th century the concept of popular medicine, or folk medicine, has been familiar to both doctors and anthropologists. Doctors, anthropologists and medical anthropologists used these terms to describe the resources, other than the help of health professionals, which European or Latin American peasants used to resolve any health problems. The term was also used to describe the health practices of aborigines in different parts of the world, with particular emphasis on their ethnobotanical knowledge. This knowledge is fundamental for isolating alkaloids and active pharmacological principles. Furthermore, studying the rituals surrounding popular therapies served to challenge Western psychopathological categories, as well as the relationship in the West between science and religion. Doctors were not trying to turn popular medicine into an anthropological concept, rather they wanted to construct a scientifically based medical concept which they could use to establish the cultural limits of biomedicine.^[12][13]

The concept of folk medicine was taken up by professional anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century to demarcate between magical practices, medicine and religion and to explore the role and the significance of popular healers and their self-medicating practices. For them, popular medicine was a specific cultural feature of some groups of humans which was distinct from the universal practices of biomedicine. If every culture had its own specific popular medicine based on its general cultural features, it would be possible to propose the existence of as many medical systems as there were cultures and, therefore, develop the comparative study of these systems. Those medical systems which showed none of the syncretic features of European popular medicine were called primitive or pretechnical medicine according to whether they referred to contemporary aboriginal cultures or to cultures predating Classical Greece. Those cultures with a documentary corpus, such as the Tibetan, traditional Chinese or Ayurvedic cultures, were sometimes called systematic medicines. The comparative study of medical systems is known as ethnomedicine or, if psychopathology is the object of study, ethnopsychiatry (Beneduce 2007, 2008) or transcultural psychiatry (Bibeau, 1997).

Under this concept, medical systems would be seen as the specific product of each ethnic group's cultural history. Scientific biomedicine would become another medical system and therefore a cultural form which could be studied as such. This position, which originated in the cultural relativism maintained by cultural anthropology, allowed the debate with medicine and psychiatry to revolve around some fundamental questions:

1. The relative influence of genotypical and phenotypical factors in relation to personality and certain forms of pathology, especially psychiatric and psychosomatic pathologies.
2. The influence of culture on what a society considers to be normal, pathological or abnormal.
3. The verification in different cultures of the universality of the nosological categories of biomedicine and psychiatry.
4. The identification and description of diseases belonging to specific cultures which have not been previously described by clinical medicine. These are known as ethnic disorders and, more recently, as culture bound syndromes, and include the evil eye and tarantism among European peasants, being possessed or in a state of trance in many cultures, and nervous anorexia, nerves and premenstrual syndrome in Western societies.

Since the end of the 20th century, medical anthropologists have had a much more sophisticated understanding of the problem of cultural representations and social practices related to health, disease and medical care and attention. These have been understood as being universal with very diverse local forms articulated in transactional processes. The link at the end of this page is included to offer a wide panorama of current positions in medical anthropology.

Applied medical anthropology[link]

In the United States, Canada, Mexico and Brazil, collaboration between anthropology and medicine was initially concerned with implementing community health programs among ethnic and cultural minorities and with the qualitative and ethnographic evaluation of health institutions (hospitals and mental hospitals) and primary care services. Regarding the community health programs, the intention was to resolve the problems of establishing these services for a complex mosaic of ethnic groups. The ethnographic evaluation involved analyzing the interclass conflicts within the institutions which had an undesirable effect on their administrative reorganization and their institutional objectives, particularly those conflicts among doctors, nurses, auxiliary staff and administrative staff. The ethnographic reports show that interclass crises directly affected therapeutic criteria and care of the ill. They also contributed new methodological criteria for evaluating the new institutions resulting from the reforms as well as experimental care techniques such as therapeutic communities.

The ethnographic evidence supported criticisms of institutional custodialism and contributed decisively to policies of deinstitutionalizing psychiatric and social care in general and led to, in some countries such as Italy, a rethink of the guidelines on education and promoting health.

The empirical answers to these questions led to anthropologists being involved in many areas. These included: developing international and community health programs in developing countries; evaluating the influence of social and cultural variables in the epidemiology of certain forms of psychiatric pathology (transcultural psychiatry); studying cultural resistance to innovation in therapeutic and care practices; analysing healing practices toward immigrants; and studying traditional healers, folk healers and empirical midwives who may be reinvented as health workers (the so-called barefoot doctors).

Also, since the 1960s, biomedicine in developed countries has been faced by a series of problems which demand that we inspect the (unfortunately-named) predisposing social or cultural factors, which have been reduced to mere variables in quantitative protocols and subordinated to causal biological or genetic interpretations. Among these the following are of particular note:

a) The transition between a dominant system designed for acute infectious pathology to a system designed for chromic degenerative pathology without any specific etiological therapy. b) The emergence of the need to develop long term treatment mechanisms and strategies, as opposed to incisive therapeutic treatments. c) The influence of concepts such as quality of life in relation to classic biomedical therapeutic criteria.

Added to these are the problems associated with implementing community health mechanisms. These problems are perceived initially as tools for fighting against unequal access to health services. However, once a comprehensive service is available to the public, new problems emerge out of ethnic, cultural or religious differences, or from differences between age groups, genders or social classes.

If implementing community care mechanisms gives rise to one set of problems, then a whole new set of problems also arises when these same mechanisms are dismantled and the responsibilities which they once assumed are placed back on the shoulders of individual members of society.

In all these fields, local and qualitative ethnographic research is indispensable for understanding the way patients and their social networks incorporate knowledge on health and illness when their experience is nuanced by complex cultural influences. These influences result from the nature of social relations in advanced societies and from the influence of social communication media, especially audiovisual media and advertising.

The agenda of medical anthropology[link]

Currently, research in medical anthropology is one of the main growth areas in the field of anthropology as a whole and important processes of internal specialization are taking place. For this reason, any agenda is always debatable. In general, we may consider the following five basic fields:

• the development of systems of medical knowledge and medical care
• the doctor and patient relationship
• the integration of alternative medical systems in culturally diverse environments
• the interaction of social, environmental and biological factors which influence health and illness both in the individual and the community as a whole
• the critical analysis of interaction between psychiatric services and migrant populations ("critical ethnopsychiatry": Beneduce 2004, 2007)
• the impact of biomedicine and biomedical technologies in non-Western settings

Other subjects that have become central to medical anthropology worldwide are violence and social suffering (Farmer, 1999, 2003; Beneduce, 2010) as well as other issues that involve physical and psychological harm and suffering that are not a result of illness. On the other hand, there are fields that intersect with medical anthropology in terms of research methodology and theoretical production, such as cultural psychiatry and transcultural psychiatry or ethnopsychiatry.

The training of medical anthropologists[link]

All medical anthropologists are trained in anthropology as their main discipline. Many come from health professions such as medicine or nursing, whereas others come from backgrounds such as psychology, social work, social education or sociology. Cultural and transcultural psychiatrists are trained as anthropologists and, naturally, psychiatric clinicians. Training in medical anthropology is normally acquired at a master's (M.A. or M.Sc.) and doctoral level. In Latin countries there are specific masters' in medical anthropology, such as in México [1], Brazil pt:Antropologia da Saúde, and Spain [2], while in the United States universities such as the University of South Florida, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, University of Connecticut, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Arizona and the University of Washington [3] offer PhD programs focused on this subject. The University of South Florida, the University of Arizona, the University of Connecticut and the University of Washington [4] also offer a dual degree (MA/PhD) in applied anthropology with a MPH. In the UK, Durham University is known for MSc and PhD programs in Medical Anthropology. A fairly comprehensive account of different postgraduate training courses in different countries can be found on the web site of the Society of Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association [5].

The literature on medical anthropology[link]

Despite the high prevalence of English literature on medical anthropology there is an enormous quantity of medical anthropological research available in other languages, in books, or chapters of books and also in periodicals.[6]

See also[link]

• Critical medical anthropology
• Cultural ecology
• Culture-bound syndrome
• Ecological anthropology
• Epidemiological transition
• Ethnomedicine
• Medical sociology

Further reading[link]

The following books present a global panorama on international medical anthropology, and can be useful as handbooks for beginners, students interested or for people who need a general text on this topic.

• Aguirre Beltran, G. (1986) Antropologia Médica. México, La Casa Chata.
• Albretch GL, Fitzpatrick R Scrimshaw S, (2000) Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine. London, Sage.
• Anderson, Robert (1996) Magic, Science and Health. The Aims and the Achievements of Medical Anthropology. Fort Worth, Harcourt Brace.
• Baer, Hans, Singer, Merrill, & Susser, Ida (2003)Medical Anthropology and the World System. Westport, CT, Praeger.
• Beneduce, Roberto (2004), Frontiere dell'identità e della memoria. Etnopsichiatria e migrazione in un mondo creolo. Franco Angeli, Milano.
• Beneduce, Roberto (2007), Etnopsichiatria. Sofferenza mentale e alterità fra Storia dominio e cultura. Roma, Carocci.
• Beneduce, Roberto (2008), Breve dizionario di etnopsichiatria. Carocci, Roma
• Beneduce, Roberto (2010), Archeologie del trauma. Un'antropologia del sottosuolo. Roma, Laterza.
• Bibeau, Gilles (1997), Cultural Psychiatry in a Creolizing World. Questions for a New Research Agenda, Transcultural Psychiatry , 34-1: 9-41.
• Boixareu, RM (ed.) (2008) De la antropología filosófica a la antropología de la salud. Barcelona, Herder.
• Brown PJ, ed.(1998) Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology. Mountain View.
• Comelles, Josep M.; Dongen, Els van (eds.) (2002). Themes in Medical Anthropology. Perugia: Fondazione Angelo Celli Argo.
• Dongen, Els; Comelles, Josep M. (2001). Medical Anthropology and Anthropology. Perugia: Fondazione Angelo Celli Argo.
• Dougherty, Molly C., & Tripp-Reimer, Toni (October 1985), "The Interface of Nursing and Anthropology", Annual Review of Anthropology 14: 219–41, DOI:10.1146/annurev.an.14.100185.001251, JSTOR 2155596 
• Ember, Carol R., & Ember, Melvin (editors), ed. (2004), Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World's Cultures, New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, ISBN 0-306-47754-8, http://books.google.com/?id=nrMRezmNrPcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Encyclopedia+of+medical+anthropology%22&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false 
• Farmer, Paul (1999) Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley, University of California Press.
• Farmer, Paul (2003) Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley, University of California Press.
• Geest, Sjaak van der; Rienks, Ari (1998) The Art of Medical Anthropology. Readings. Amsterdam, Het Spinhuis. Universiteit van Amsterdam.
• Good, Byron, Michael M. J. Fischer, Sarah S. Willen, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Eds. (2010) A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Gray, A y Seale, C (eds.) (2001) Health and disease: a reader. Buckingham-Philadelphia, PA, Open University Press.
• Hahn, Robert A. and Marcia Inhorn (eds.) (2010) Anthropology and Public Health, Second Edition: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society.Oxford University Press
• Helman, Cecil (1994) Culture Health and Illness. An Introduction for Health Professionals. London: Butterworth-Heinemann (new Fifth ed.).
• Janzen JM (2002) The Social Fabric of Health. An Introduction to MedicalAnthropology, New York, McGraw-Hill.
• Johnson, Thomas; Sargent, C. (comps.) (1992), Medical Anthropology. Contemporary Theory and Method (reedition as Sargent i Johnson, 1996). Westport, Praeger.
• Littlewood, Roland and Maurice Lipsedge (1989) Aliens and Alienists: ethnic minorities and psychiatry, London, Unwin.
• Landy, David (editor) Disease, and Healing: Studies in Medical Anthropology. New York: Macmillan.
• Lock, M & Nguyen, Vinh-Kim (2010) An Anthropology of Biomedicine, Wiley-Blackwell.ISBN 9781405110723
• Loudon, J.B. (Editor). (1976) Social Anthropology and Medicine. A.S.A. Monograph 13. London & New York: Academic Press.
• Loustaunan MO, Sobo EJ. (1997) The Cultural Context of Health, Illness and Medicine. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey.
• Martínez-Hernáez, A. (2008) Antropología médica. Teorías sobre la cultura, el poder y la enfermedad. Barcelona: Anthropos.
• Menéndez, Eduardo L. (2002) La parte negada de la cultura. Relativismo, diferencias y racismo. Barcelona: Bellaterra
• Nichter, Mark. (2008) 'Global health : why cultural perceptions, social representations, and biopolitics matter' Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
• Paul, Benjamin. (1955) "Health, Culture and Community: Case Studies of Public Reactions to Health Programs" New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Pool, R and Geissler, W. (2005). Medical Anthropology. Buckingham: Open University Press.
• Pizza, G. (2005) Antropologia medica. Saperi, pratiche e politiche del corpo. Roma: Carocci
• Romannucci-Ross L, Moerman DE, Tancredi LR. (1991) The Anthropology of Medicine. From Culture to Method. (2nd ed. 1996) New York: Bergin & Garvey.
• Samson C. (1999) Health Studies. A critical and Cross-Cultural Reader. Oxford, Blackwell.
• Singer, Merrill and Baer, Hans (2007) Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action. Lanham, AltaMira Press.
• Trevathan,W, Smith,EO, McKenna JJ (1999) Evolutionary Medicine: an interpretation in evolutionary perspective. Oxford University Press
• Trevathan,W, Smith,EO, McKenna J (2007) Evolutionary Medicine and Health: New Perspectives. Oxford University Press.
• Young, Allan (March 1976) Some implications of medical beliefs and practices for Social Anthropology. American Anthropologist. 78 (1) 5-24.
• Wiley, AS (2008) Medical anthropology: a biocultural approach. University of Southern California

References[link]

External links[link]

• Society for Medical Anthropology
• Medical Anthropology Wiki
• Anthrologica International organisation specialising in applied medical anthropology of healthcare in developing contexts
• Amades French speaking medical anthropology network
• Medical Anthropology at Home A European based medical anthropologist network
• REDAM Spanish medical anthropologist network
• Societa Italiana di Antropologia Medica Fondazione Angelo Celli Italian medical anthropologists network
• EASA's Medical Anthropology Network The Medical Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists

Paul Edward Farmer (born October 26, 1959) is an American anthropologist and physician. He is currently the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University, formerly the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, an attending physician and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. In May 2009 he was named chairman of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, succeeding his longtime friend and collaborator Jim Kim. On Friday, December 17, 2010, Harvard University's President, Drew Gilpin Faust, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, named him a Kolokotrones University Professor of Harvard University, the highest honor that the University can bestow on one of its faculty members.^[1]

He currently resides in Kigali, Rwanda. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease. Farmer is one of the founders of Partners In Health (PIH), an international health and social justice organization. His work is the subject of Tracy Kidder's 2003 book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World. He is editor-in-chief of Health and Human Rights Journal. In May 2009, Farmer was named to head the U.S. Agency for International Development,^[2] but the nomination was withdrawn.^[3] In August 2009, Paul Farmer was named United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti to assist in improving the economic and social conditions of the Caribbean nation.^[4]

Personal life and education[link]

Farmer was born in North Adams, Massachusetts and raised in Weeki Wachee, Florida. He is a graduate of Hernando High School in Brooksville, Florida and was president of his senior class.^[5] He went on to attend Duke University on a full scholarship, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in medical anthropology.^[5][6] He then attended Harvard University, earning an MD and a PhD in medical anthropology.^[6]

He and his wife Didi have two daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth, and one son, Sebastian. He currently lives in Kigali, Rwanda with his family.^[7] His younger brother, Jeff Farmer, also known as the nWo Sting, is a well-known athlete, competing on the professional wrestling circuit.^[8]

International work[link]

In 1987, Farmer, along with Ophelia Dahl, Jim Yong Kim, Thomas J. White and Todd McCormack, co-founded Partners In Health. PIH began in Cange in the Central Plateau of Haiti and has developed into a worldwide health organization. The PIH hospital in Haiti provides free treatment to patients. PIH helps patients living in poverty to obtain effective drugs to treat tuberculosis and AIDS.

In addition to his hospital in Haiti, Farmer oversees projects in Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi and Peru. His approach has its basis in ethnographic analysis and real world practicality.^[9]

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder details Farmer's work in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, as well as his efforts to balance clinical and academic responsibilities with having a family of his own. The book narrates the interactions and conflicts Farmer faces as he attempts to secure healthcare for the poor in Haiti.

Paul Farmer sits on the board of the Aristide Foundation for democracy and is a co-founder and Board Member of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.^[10] He is also a member of the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO focused on developing the Health Impact Fund.^{[citation needed]}

Farmer was appointed as the Deputy UN Special Envoy for Haiti, by former US President Bill Clinton, UN Special Envoy for Haiti, on August 11, 2009.^{[citation needed]} In this role, Dr. Farmer will support Clinton and assist in advancing their work on a day-to-day basis.^{[citation needed]}

Farmer is a board member of Kageno Worldwide, Inc., a community development agency that has worked in Kenya and Rwanda.

Awards[link]

Farmer has won honors including:^[11]

• A MacArthur Fellowship, 1993^[12]
• The 9th Annual Heinz Award in the Human Condition, 2003^[13]
• Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize for Partners in Health ($1.5 million), 2005^{[citation needed]}
• International Human Rights Award by Global Exchange.^[14]
• American Medical Association's Dr. Nathan Davis International Award in Medicine^{[citation needed]}
• 2007 Austin College Leadership Award ($100,000), which he donated to Partners in Health.^{[citation needed]}
• 2007 Sandor Teszler Award for Moral Courage and Service to Mankind and an honorary doctorate from Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.^[15]
• Member of the Institute of Medicine of The National Academies (U.S.).
• 2008 Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award presented to Farmer and Partners in Health.^{[citation needed]}
• 2011, named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. ^[16]

Publications[link]

• AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 1993, 2006 edition: ISBN 978-0-520-08343-1
• The Uses of Haiti, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994, 2003, 2005 edition: ISBN 978-1-56751-242-7
• ¿Haití para qué?, Hondarribia, Spain: HIRU Argitaletxea, 1994
• Sida en Haїti: La Victime accusée, Paris: Editions Karthala, 1996
• Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, revised 2001 edition: ISBN 978-0-520-22913-6
• Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2005 edition: ISBN 978-0-520-24326-2
• Global Health in Times of Violence, co-edited with Barbara Rylko-Bauer and Linda Whiteford, School for Advanced Research Press, 2009 edition: ISBN 978-1-934691-14-4
• Women, Poverty & AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Structural Violence (Series in Health and Social Justice), with coauthor Margaret Connors, Common Courage Press; Reprint edition (September 1996), ISBN 978-1-56751-074-4
• "Who removed Aristide?", London Review of Books, ISSN 0260-9592, April 15, 2004. Retrieved on 2007-11-19.
• Haiti After the Earthquake, Public Affairs July 12, 2011 ISBN 978-1-58648-973-1

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• "Faculty: Paul Farmer, MD, PhD". Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. http://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/people/faculty/farmer/. Retrieved 2006-12-16. 
• "About Paul Farmer". Social Medicine & Health Inequalities. Brigham and Women's Hospital. August 2003. http://www.brighamandwomens.org/socialmedicine/aboutfarmer.aspx. Retrieved 2007-07-01. 
• Kidder, Tracy (2003). Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House Publishing Group. pp. 1–300. ISBN 0-8129-7301-1. http://books.google.com/?id=XifdzgU9ilsC&pg=PP1. Retrieved 2011-03-17. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paul Farmer

• Partners In Health
• Dr. Paul Farmer Challenges Profit-Driven Medical System While Bringing Healthcare to Poor Communities Worldwide, Democracy Now, May 28, 2008. Interview with Amy Goodman. Transcript, audio and video.
• Video of Building a Community-based Health Care Movement, Dr. Paul Farmer's speech at University of Washington, by UWTV, November 13, 2006
• Video of Paul Farmer and Tracy Kidder presenting the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Cambridge Community Television, October 20, 2006
• Video of Reinvigorating the Struggle: A Clinical and Social Justice Perspective on International Health, Dr. Paul Farmer's speech at the University of Virginia, by UVA NewsMakers, (RealPlayer required)
• Audio reading of a book about Farmer's work in Haiti, by NPR
• Audio of Speech by Farmer as part of the 2006 Calvin College January series
• Audio of Speech by Farmer as part of the 2005 Calvin College January series
• Audio of Interview of Farmer rebroadcast by WBUR Boston
• Audio of 10/03/2003 episode of "On Point" which includes an interview of Farmer
• Audio of a talk at MIT where Farmer and Noam Chomsky speak about Haiti and Farmer's book "The Uses of Haiti" – the link is near the bottom of the page.
• Featured in the documentary "Aristide and the Endless Revolution" by Nicolas Rossier
• Video Featured in the documentary Pin of Hope, currently in production^[when?]
• Dr. Paul Farmer on Haiti’s Challenges Following Catastrophic Earthquake – video report by Democracy Now!

Arthur Kleinman

Arthur Kleinman (born 1941) is a prominent American psychiatrist and is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University, USA. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture, was the chair of the Harvard Department of Anthropology from 2004–07 and currently serves as the director of Harvard's Asia Center. Kleinman is married to Joan Kleinman, a sinologist at Harvard.

Since 1968, Kleinman has conducted research in Chinese society, first in Taiwan, and since 1978 in China, on depression, somatization, epilepsy, schizophrenia and suicide, and other forms of violence. He has written on the intersection of public health and international issues as well as social suffering, on cross-cultural psychiatry, and on the individual experience of pain and disability.

Kleinman has done much to demonstrate that mental distress is much more likely to be expressed as somatized distress (i.e. as a bodily ailment) than as psychological distress by Chinese or East Asian patients. He has also contributed to anthropological and medical understanding of culture-bound syndromes, particularly in Chinese and East Asian culture (such as Koro).

In 1976, he founded the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,^[1] and was its Editor-in-Chief until 1986.^[2] The journal was continued by Byron and Mary-Jo Good, and Peter J. Guarnaccia.^[3]

Kleinman has co-authored many works with other celebrated psychiatrists and researchers in the field of mental health and cross-cultural psychiatry, including Paul Farmer, Veena Das, Margaret Lock, Michael Phillips, Byron Good, Mary Delvecchio Good, Tsung-yi Lin, and Leon Eisenberg. Perhaps Kleinman's most influential work is Patients and healers in the context of culture (1980), a groundbreaking work of medical anthropology, followed by The Illness Narratives: suffering, healing, and the human condition (1988) and Social origins of distress and disease: depression, neurasthenia, and pain in modern China (1986).

Kleinman is a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Science; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has delivered numerous lectures on a variety of topics at universities around the world. Most recently, his talks have been on the subject of moral experience. He has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). He was awarded an honorary professorship at Fudan University. Shortly thereafter, he was Cleveringa Professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

He directed the World Mental Health Report, co-chaired the American Psychiatric Association’s Taskforce on Culture and DSM-IV, co-chaired the 2002 Institute of Medicine report on Preventing Suicide, and also co-chaired in 2001 and 2002 both the NIH conference on the Science and Ethics of the Placebo and the NIH conference on Stigma. In September 2003, he gave the Distinguished Lecture sponsored by the Fogarty International Center at NIH on the Global Epidemic of Depression and Suicide. He is a consultant to the WHO where he chaired the technical advisory committee of the Nations for Mental Health Action Program and in December 2002 gave the keynote address to the WHO’s first international conference on global mental health research. He is a winner of the Wellcome Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute; a recipient of an honorary Doctorate of Science from York University (Canada); and the 2001 winner of the Franz Boas Award of the American Anthropological Association, its highest award. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. His most recent book, What Really Matters, (Oxford University Press, 2006) addresses existential dangers and uncertainties that make moral experience, religion, and ethics so crucial to individuals and society today. This book has been translated and published in Chinese editions both in Shanghai and Taipei.

In September 2003, he co-directed a conference at Harvard on SARS in China; and in the 2003-2004 academic year he co-directed a Conference at Harvard on AIDS in China. In December 2006, he co-directed an NSF funded international meeting on Asian Flus/Avian Flu and in May 2007 he co-chaired a conference on Values in Global Health. He is a member of the Steering Committee of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, is a member of the Advisory Board of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and is on the Steering Committee of Harvard’s newly created China fund. He was also appointed to the Dean’s Advisory Council in Social Sciences. A member of the Steering Committee of the Harvard Institute of Global Health, Kleinman is co-chair of its Committee on Mental Health and of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committee on Global Health.

In 2006 Arthur Kleinman received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, and in 2008 received from the SMA the George Foster Award. In 2004, he was awarded the Doubleday Medal in Medical Humanities by University of Manchester, England. In 2007 he received an award in the medical humanities at Imperial College, London. He was also appointed by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services of the U.S. Government to the Advisory Council of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health. In 2003 Kleinman chaired the Selection Committee for the NIH’s new Pioneer Awards; and in 2007 he was appointed to the NIH’s Council of Councils.

Arthur Kleinman received his A.B. and M.D. from Stanford University and M.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard. He did an internship in internal medicine at Yale and his psychiatric residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has supervised more than 65 Ph.D. students (including 12 M.D.-Ph.D. students), and worked with more than 200 post-doctoral fellows, and he has taught hundreds of medical students and undergraduate students. Kleinman has received more than 50 research grants, and is currently involved in various research projects in China studying depression; stigma; suicide; and the health consequences of rural-urban migration.

Selected list of published works[link]

• Medicine in Chinese cultures : comparative studies of health care in Chinese and other societies: papers and discussions from a conference held in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., February 1974 / edited by Arthur Kleinman ... [et al.]. -- U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, 1975.
• Culture and healing in Asian societies : anthropological, psychiatric, and public health studies / edited by Arthur Kleinman ... [et al.]. - - G.K. Hall, 1978
• Normal and abnormal behavior in Chinese culture / edited by Arthur Kleinman and Tsung-yi Lin. -- D. Reidel, 1981. -- (Culture, illness, and healing / editor-in-chief, Arthur Kleinman ; v. 2)
• Patients and healers in the context of culture : an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry / Arthur Kleinman. -- University of California Press, 1980.
• Culture and depression : studies in the anthropology and cross-cultura l psychiatry of affect and disorder / edited by Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good. -- University of California Press, 1985. --
• Social origins of distress and disease : depression, neurasthenia, and pain in modern China / Kleinman—Yale Univ ersity Press, 1986
• The illness narratives: suffering, healing, and the human condition / Kleinman—Basic Books, 1988
• Rethinking psychiatry : from cultural category to personal experience / Kleinman ; Free Press, 1991 ISBN 0-02-917441-4
• Social suffering / edited by Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock—University of California Press, 1997 & Oxford University Press, 1997
• Writing at the margin : discourse between anthropology and medicine / Kleinman. -- University of California Press, 1995
• What really matters: living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger / Kleinman—Oxford University Press, 2006. Translated into Chinese: Shanghai Joint Publishing Company, Shanghai, P.R. China, 2007; translated in Chinese: PsyGarden Publishing Company, Taiwan, 2007

Further reading[link]

• Richard A. Shweder (1988), Suffering in Style, "Review of Kleinman's (1986) book Social Origins of Distress and Disease", Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12: 479–497, DOI:10.1007/BF00054499, http://www.springerlink.com/content/hnx262180v304648/  (See also chapter 8 in Thinking through cultures, which is substantially the same text with minor amendments).
• Shweder, Richard A (1991), "Suffering in Style: On Arthur Kleinman", Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 313–331, ISBN 0-674-88416-7, http://books.google.com.au/books?id=7DmCoEsxVxQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Thinking+through+cultures%22&source=bl&ots=b-yGu16oFO&sig=BTpD4C9pX7y5q0LWtTluYvg4ss4&hl=en&ei=wq79S7-nF4qycanKmZAK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=arthur%20kleinman&f=false 
• Peter J. Guarnaccia, "Editorial", Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 27: 249–257, DOI:10.1023/A:1025390614115, ISSN 1573-076X, http://www.springerlink.com/content/l2g7763657747290/ 

References[link]

Mitsuho Ikeda (2002). "Bibliography of Arthur Kleinman, 1941-". Archived from the original on 2006-01-17. http://web.archive.org/web/20060117160207/http://www.let.kumamoto-u.ac.jp/cs/cu/0012.html. Retrieved 2006-04-13. 

• "Department of Social Medicine People". Harvard Medical School. http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dsm/WorkFiles/html/people/faculty/faculty.html. Retrieved 2006-12-16. ^{[dead link]}