ORIGINS: REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF THE SMA AND ITS OFFICIAL PUBLICATION

Abstract

have discovered enough material to write a book. . From 1967 in Washington, DC, through 1968 in Seattle, 1969 in New Orleans, and 1970 in San Diego, those with a special interest in an area called medical anthropology moved from being a collectivity of interested persons to a Group for Medical Anthropology (GMA), and then to a Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA). And from 1968 to 1983 the Medical Anthropology Newsletter (M.A.N.), which kept us in communication with each other between annual meetings, became the Medical Anthropology Quarterly (MA Q, which, in turn, will soon become an international journal. Since this is an article about the history and origins of the Society for Medical Anthropology, all of these acronyms have some part in this account. When Margaret Lock (President of the SMA) invited me to write this article, I was pleased, although I experienced moments of panic when I realized that large chunks of the documented record had been placed in the Medical Anthropology Archive in the basement of the AAA office building in Washington, DC. Other pieces of the record were lost forever when one of my more efficient secretaries cleared my burgeoning files of all pre-1970 correspondence that appeared to be discontinuous-precisely the period that is most significant, historically, for an article on origins. Fortunately, I have discovered enough material to write a book rather than an article, and my problem has been to reduce this statement to its