Medical Anthropology at the Intersections

Abstract

It may be hard to believe, but the discipline of is now nearly 50 years old. In 1959, one of the first references to medical anthropology was made in a article by a physician-anthropologist named James Roney, entitled Anthropology: A Synthetic Discipline (Roney 1959). Craig Janes and I discovered this in our research for article, just published in the new journal Global Public Health, on the legacy of our University of California San Francisco (UCSF) mentor, Frederick Dunn (Inhorn and Janes 2007). Fred, along with Roney, Charles Leslie, Margaret Clark, Benjamin Paul, and George Foster, were among the founders of our field. When both Ben Paul and George Foster passed away in their nineties this May, within about one week of each other, many of you replied to my e-mail announcement by saying that an had passed in anthropology. This passing of era has caused me to reflect on how far has come as a discipline and where it is headed. Medical is now very firmly entrenched not only within the larger discipline of but also as one of the social sciences in many universities around the world. The practicing side of our profession is also prospering, as seen the 2007 Society for Applied Anthropology meetings, which 1,800 anthropologists gathered in Vancouver and where themes were prominent. In short, I believe that is truly thriving. Personally, I feel grateful that perhaps this generation's most famous anthropologist, Paul Farmer, through his life's work and his many books-including Pathologies of Power (2003), which has just won the prestigious School for American Research's J. I. Staley Prize-has brought so many young people into the fold. But, where is heading in the future? I would like to argue here that the cutting edges of our field are now found at the intersections of many other disciplines. With our solid foundation in place, is now expanding outward and interacting in many productive ways across disciplinary boundaries. In the new millennium, interdisciplinarity is certainly one of the key tropes in the academy, and, my own university, I am happy to be the