Analysis Of Medical Systems Research Articles

Environmental Materialities and the History of Pandemics.

Over the last several decades, a growing group of environmental and medical historians have argued that engagement with the materiality of disease is critical to eroding the false boundaries between environment and health, and especially to the historical study of major epidemics and pandemics. This article evaluates the ways in which environmental and medical historians have engaged materiality when thinking through questions of infectious disease. It argues that far from eschewing cultural constructions of disease and analysis of medical systems, these works demonstrate that engagement with materiality in the study of disease articulates the stakes of medical regimes and practices of healing, and renders legible the multiple scales at which epidemics occur. Addressing key controversies in the use of sources, it provides examples of works that incorporate material objects, biological ideas and actors, and non-humans without falling prey to the extremes of "biological determinism" or "constructivism." It argues that commonalities in the methods employed by these works - utilization of scientific frameworks and data, multispecies analysis, attention to scale, and spatial thinking - reveal unseen and untold aspects of past pandemics. It concludes with a brief example of how these frameworks come together in practice through a case study on the history of enteric fever in Dublin, Ireland.

Comparative systems of health care

Because they characterize the state of the art of comparative research in health care systems this paper opens with brief outlines of 3 conference projects: 1) Comparative Studies of Health Care in Chinese and Other Societies Seattle Washington 1974; 2) Historical Anthropology in Medicine Freiburg West Germany 1975; and 3) Theoretical Foundations for the Comparative Study of Medical Systems Washington D.C. 1976. Together they exemplify the diversity of people who have entered this field and they provide evidence of the limitations and difficulties of this type of research. Only recently have sociological approaches been applied to non-industrial societies and have anthropologists entered complex civilizations. This development though raises the question whether those anthropologists who emphasize the concept of culture as the prime independent variable shaping a medical system are sufficiently equipped to approach pluralistic settings and to explain change. Attempts by some scholars to elaborate comprehensive models of medicine as cultural systems seem to justify these doubts. In this regard the tendency towards creating Medical Anthropology as a discipline in its own right may be of questionable value. Comparative research in health care has been and probably will be pursued on the basis of differing interests ranging from a goal of changing certain habits to the support of social revolution. Efforts to establish one specialized discipline or to develop one comprehensive theory for the comparative analysis of medical systems may therefore not be very meaningful.

Section 4 comparative systems of health care

Abstract Many studies on isolated health care systems, using emic or etic perspectives and focusing on historical or contemporary issues, have resulted in a great number of publications. Yet, the comparison of the data accumulated is not an easy task. While research in the history of Western medicine has provided detailed knowledge about personalities and dates of “progress”, as well as accurately translated or edited classic texts, very little comparable material exists on non-Western historical therapy systems. As to contemporary settings, a separation of labor between anthropologists, studying preferably non-Western, homogeneous communities, and sociologists, focusing on certain segments of health care in complex, industrialized societies, has created two very different sets of data. Only recently have sociological approaches been applied to non-industrialized societies and have anthropologists entered complex civilizations. This development, though, raises the question whether those anthropologists who emphasize the concept of “culture” as the prime independent variable shaping a medical system, are sufficiently equipped to approach pluralistic settings and to explain change. Attempts by some scholars to elaborate “comprehensive models of medicine as cultural systems” seem to justify these doubts. In this regard, the tendency towards creating “Medical Anthropology” as a discipline in its own right may be of questionable value. Comparative research in health care has been and, probably, will be pursued on the basis of differing interests, ranging from a goal of changing certain habits to the support of social revolution. Efforts to establish one specialized discipline or to develop one comprehensive theory for the comparative analysis of medical systems may, therefore, not be very meaningful.