Medical anthropology: culture and illness, ethnomedicine, global health disparities
Anchor (Master): Kleinman, A. — The Illness Narratives (1988)
Intuition Beginner
Disease is biological; illness is the experience of being sick. The two are not the same thing. The same disease — tuberculosis, for instance — can mean very different things in different cultures: a curse, an imbalance of vital forces, a bacterial infection. Medical anthropologists study how culture shapes who gets sick, how people understand illness, and how healing is practiced around the world.
Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and anthropologist, drew the line sharply. Disease, in his usage, is the biological pathology a doctor diagnoses. Illness is what the patient lives through: the symptoms, the fear, the lost wages, the meaning a family gives it. A doctor treats disease. A healer addresses illness. Good care, Kleinman argued, must do both at once.
Paul Farmer was both an anthropologist and a physician. He showed that the world's deadliest diseases — tuberculosis, HIV, malaria — kill mostly poor people. He called the cause structural violence: suffering built into economic and political structures, not caused by any single villain. His organization, Partners In Health, proved that drug-resistant TB could be treated in the poorest places where experts had said it was impossible.
Different cultures have built different healing systems. Biomedicine — the system of Western doctors, drugs, and hospitals — is only one among many. Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine are thousands of years old. Shamans, herbalists, midwives, and faith healers still treat most of the world's people. Many patients use several systems at once, seeing a doctor and a healer and taking traditional remedies in between.
Medical anthropology also asks why health is so unequal. A baby born in Japan can expect to live past eighty. A baby born in the Central African Republic may not reach fifty-five. These gaps are not accidents of nature. They follow lines of poverty, colonial history, race, and access to care. To understand illness, you have to understand the social world that produces it.
Visual Beginner
| Concept | What it names | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|
| Disease | The biological pathology | The clinician |
| Illness | The lived experience of being unwell | The patient and family |
| Sickness | The social fact and community response | The group |
| Healing system | Core idiom | Typical practitioner |
|---|---|---|
| Biomedicine | Pathogens, lesions, mechanisms | Physician, nurse |
| Ayurveda | Balance of vata, pitta, kapha | Vaidya |
| Traditional Chinese medicine | qi, yin-yang, five phases | Acupuncturist, herbalist |
| Curanderismo | Spiritual and social causation | Curandero/a |
| Shamanism | Soul loss, spirit intrusion | Shaman |
Worked example Beginner
Example 1: When doctor and patient hold different models
When a doctor tells a patient she has hypertension, the two may be talking about different things. The doctor means high blood pressure straining the heart. The patient may believe her condition comes from worry, from a difficult marriage, or from a spiritual cause. Kleinman called these understandings explanatory models.
When doctor and patient hold different models, treatment fails — not because the medicine is wrong, but because the patient never agrees to it. Asking patients what they think caused the illness sounds simple, but it reframes the encounter from instruction to negotiation.
Example 2: Drug-resistant tuberculosis in Lima
In the late 1990s, drug-resistant tuberculosis was spreading in the slums of Lima. International health authorities argued it was too expensive and too difficult to treat in poor settings, and that efforts should focus on prevention instead. Farmer and his team disagreed.
They brought the full treatment — months of second-line drugs, daily supervised doses, food and transport support — directly to patients in their homes. The cure rates matched those of wealthy countries. The barrier was never medical. It was political and economic.
Example 3: Two healers for one fever
A child in rural Ghana falls feverish. The family consults a biomedical clinic, where a nurse diagnoses malaria and prescribes antimalarials. They also visit a traditional healer, who reads the fever as a sign of a disturbed relationship with an ancestor. Both treatments proceed at once.
Medical anthropologists call this medical pluralism. Most of the world navigates several healing systems simultaneously, and the systems answer different questions. The clinic treats the parasite. The healer addresses why this child, in this family, at this time.
Check your understanding Beginner
Formal definition Intermediate+
Disease, illness, and sickness
Three nested concepts anchor the field. Disease, in Kleinman's terms, is the biological pathology as read by biomedicine — a lesion, an infection, a measurable dysfunction. Illness is the human experience of being unwell: the symptoms as felt and narrated, the cultural meanings attached, the social fallout of missed work and stigma, and the personal response. Sickness is the broader social fact — how a community recognizes, explains, and responds to a condition. The same tuberculosis bacterium produces a disease (the infection), an illness (the patient's suffering and interpretation), and a sickness (the household's lost income and the community's stigma). Medical anthropology insists that collapsing these three into one — as biomedicine tends to — loses exactly what matters most for care.
The sick role and its limits
Talcott Parsons described the sick role as a temporary social contract: the sick person is excused from normal duties, but must want to get well and must seek competent help. The model captured something real about how industrial societies manage illness. Critics showed its limits soon enough. It assumes a single episode with a clear end, fitting acute disease better than chronic illness. It reflects a mid-twentieth-century Western, middle-class view. It does not describe chronic conditions, mental illness, disability, or the experience of being sick in a place with no clinic. It also grants the physician sole authority to define legitimate sickness — an assumption medical anthropology has done much to question.
Explanatory models
Kleinman's explanatory models are the accounts that patients, families, and healers hold about a given episode of illness. He framed them around five questions: What caused the problem? Why did it start? Why now? What will happen? What treatment will work? A biomedical physician, an Ayurvedic vaidya, a shaman, and a worried parent can answer all five differently for the same child's fever. Clinical friction — missed appointments, "non-compliance," distrust — often stems not from ignorance but from a clash of models that no one has surfaced. Eliciting the patient's model takes minutes and reframes the encounter from instruction to negotiation.
Ethnomedicine
Ethnomedicine is the comparative study of how societies conceptualize, diagnose, and treat illness. Charles Leslie's work on Asian medical systems showed that Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and Unani are not folk survivals but sophisticated, literate, self-critical traditions with their own physiology and pharmacology. Ayurveda centers on the three doshas — vata, pitta, kapha — and the balance among them. Chinese medicine works through qi, yin and yang, and the five phases. Latin American curanderismo and African American rootwork bind healing to spiritual and social causation. Shamanism, found across Siberia, the Amazon, and the Arctic, treats illness as soul loss or spirit intrusion. These systems do not merely predate biomedicine; in most of the world they coexist with it, and most patients move between them.
Healing roles
Every society staffs its healing system with recognized specialists. Physicians diagnose and intervene on the body. Shamans journey on the patient's behalf to retrieve a lost soul or confront a hostile spirit. Herbalists know the medicinal plants of a region and their indications. Midwives manage pregnancy and birth. Diviners identify hidden causes — witchcraft, ancestor displeasure, broken taboos. Priests address the moral and ritual dimensions of suffering. The same person may hold several of these roles at once. What unites them is that each role is licensed by the community to diagnose, to treat, and — crucially — to make suffering meaningful.
Ethnopsychiatry and culture-bound syndromes
Ethnopsychiatry studies how culture shapes the experience and expression of mental distress. Culture-bound syndromes are patterns of distress recognized within a particular society: koro (the fear that the genitals are retracting into the body, reported in Southeast Asia), amok (sudden violent outbursts, Malaysia), susto (fright-induced soul loss, Latin America), ataque de nervios (a spell of shouting, trembling, and dissociation, among Caribbean Latinos), and taijin kyofusho (distress at offending others through one's appearance or odor, Japan). The category forces a hard question: is every disorder, including anorexia nervosa, bound to the culture that produces it? Kleinman argued that Western psychiatry's universalist claims often collapse distinct local forms of suffering into a single imported diagnosis.
Critical medical anthropology
Merrill Singer and Hans Baer founded critical medical anthropology by applying political economy to health. Their argument: disease is not distributed at random. It follows the fault lines of class, race, and gender that global capitalism produces. World-systems theory, applied to health, predicts that the peripheral and semiperipheral nations bear the heaviest disease burden while the core nations concentrate medical resources. Singer's concept of the syndemic captures this — the clustering of two or more diseases in a population, interacting with each other and amplified by the same social conditions. The SAVA syndemic (substance abuse, violence, and AIDS) in impoverished US neighborhoods is the canonical example. These are not independent epidemics but one tangled crisis rooted in shared structural conditions.
Structural violence
Farmer's structural violence names the suffering produced by entrenched social and economic arrangements rather than by individual acts. It is structural because it is built into the distribution of resources, and violent because it maims and kills. A rural Haitian who dies of tuberculosis because she cannot reach a clinic, because the road is impassable, because the health budget was cut to service foreign debt, is a victim of structural violence — though no single person aimed the blow. Farmer called these arrangements pathologies of power. The concept reframes health disparities as a matter of justice, not of behavior or culture, and it underwrites his insistence that treatment is a human right rather than a commodity.
Health disparities and embodiment
Health disparities are systematic, unjust differences in health between groups defined by wealth, race, gender, or geography. Nancy Krieger's ecosocial theory asks how social conditions literally become biology — how discrimination "gets under the skin," in her phrase. She calls this process embodiment. David Williams' research documents how chronic exposure to racism harms Black Americans' health across dozens of outcomes. Arline Geronimus' weathering hypothesis argues that the constant physiological stress of living under racism and poverty ages the body prematurely. Life expectancy in Japan is about 84; in the Central African Republic, about 53. These are not genetic differences. They are the measurable residue of history and inequality written into bodies.
Key result: explanatory models, structural violence, and syndemics Intermediate+
Two ideas, more than any others, define medical anthropology's contribution to how the world thinks about health. The first is Kleinman's distinction between disease and illness, operationalized through explanatory models. The second is Farmer's structural violence. Together they reframe the central question of global health from "how do we treat disease?" to "who is allowed to get sick, and who is allowed to be treated?"
Kleinman showed that in any clinical encounter two explanatory models are in play, and they frequently diverge. The clinician's model is technical: a pathogen, a lesion, a mechanism. The patient's model is narrative: a cause in the full sense — why me, why now, what it means, what will restore order. When the models are not reconciled, the patient may leave with a prescription never filled, a referral never honored, or a diagnosis never disclosed to family. Kleinman's finding, borne out across decades of clinical ethnography, is that eliciting the patient's model costs minutes and recovers a large fraction of what gets labeled non-compliance. This is a nontrivial clinical result with almost no cost.
Farmer's structural violence completes the picture by relocating the cause of much disease outside the body and outside individual behavior. The same germ infects rich and poor; the poor die of it because they are poor. Drug-resistant tuberculosis, HIV, malaria, and maternal mortality concentrate where resources do not. Farmer and Partners In Health demonstrated in Haiti and Peru that the gap is closable: with accompaniment — long-term, community-based support that keeps patients in treatment — cure rates for multidrug-resistant TB in the poorest settings matched those of Boston. The result was not a new drug but a refusal to accept that poverty excuses inaction.
Singer's syndemic concept generalizes the point. Where diseases cluster, they interact, and they cluster because the social conditions that produce them cluster. A health policy that treats each disease in isolation, disease by disease, misses the structure that links them. The SAVA syndemic — substance abuse, violence, and AIDS woven together in marginalized neighborhoods — cannot be addressed by three separate clinics. The syndemic framing demands attention to the conditions themselves, which is precisely what biomedicine, trained on the single pathogen, is structured not to see.
Exercises Intermediate+
Advanced results Master
Clinical anthropology: illness narratives and the ethics of caregiving
Kleinman's clinical anthropology moved the discipline into the examining room. In The Illness Narratives (1988) he argued that chronic illness is lived as a story, and that the clinician's task is to elicit that story — not as decoration but as diagnostic and therapeutic data. The patient's narrative encodes the explanatory model, the family's stakes, the feared outcomes, and the conditions under which treatment will actually be followed. Kleinman later extended this into a phenomenology of suffering (What Really Matters, 2006) and a critique of how US medical training strips the moral and relational core out of care (The Illness Narratives; Ethics of Caregiving). His insistence that caregiving is a moral practice, not a technical transaction, has reshaped both medical anthropology and bioethics. The clinical ethnography — sustained fieldwork inside a hospital or clinic — became the method through which anthropologists document how disease and illness diverge in actual practice, and how that divergence harms patients who fall through the gap between the two.
Critical global health: Farmer, accompaniment, and its limits
Farmer's body of work — Infections and Inequalities (1999), Pathologies of Power (2003), Partner to the Poor — built a model of health as a matter of justice rather than charity. The operational arm was Partners In Health, which proved in rural Haiti and the slums of Lima that multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV could be treated in the poorest settings. The method was accompaniment: community health workers walk with patients through long regimens, ensuring that poverty does not interrupt treatment. The cure rates silenced the argument that treatment was "not cost-effective" for the poor. The model has its critics. Some ask whether accompaniment scales beyond the sites where PIH built deep infrastructure, and whether it depends on charismatic leadership and external funding that cannot be replicated. Ugandan and Kenyan commentators have pressed on whether the model transfers cleanly across very different health systems and political economies. The debate is productive: it turns on what "replicable" means when the barrier being dismantled is structural rather than medical.
The anthropology of biomedicine
Biomedicine is itself a cultural system, and a generation of anthropologists has studied it as such. Margaret Lock's Twice Dead (2002) traced how the category of brain death was negotiated differently in Japan and North America, showing that even the definition of death is cultural. Marcia Inhorn's work on infertility in Egypt and Lebanon documents how assisted reproduction is taken up within Islamic ethical frameworks. Rayna Rapp's Testing Women, Testing the Fetus (1999) turned amniocentesis into a study of the "tentative pregnancy" and the moral worlds of prenatal decision-making. Sharon Kaufman's Ordinary Medicine (2015) examines how the extension of life through high-technology interventions has reorganized dying itself. Adele Clarke and colleagues proposed the term biomedicalization to capture how medicalization has been overtaken by a more technoscientific, market-driven reorganization of life. These studies share a refusal to treat biomedicine as a neutral view from nowhere; it is, like every healing system, a way of making the body and its troubles intelligible.
Mental health and psychiatry across cultures
The cross-cultural study of mental health turns on a tension between universalism and particularism. Kleinman's work on depression and neurasthenia in China argued that what Western psychiatry reads as masked depression was, for Chinese patients, a legitimate diagnostic category in its own right — and that universalist claims about depression flatten real differences. The WHO DOSMD studies found that schizophrenia outcomes were better in some developing countries than in developed ones, a finding still debated: does it reflect genuinely different disease trajectories, family structures, or diagnostic practice? The DSM-5 introduced the cultural formulation interview and a section on cultural concepts of distress, partly in response to anthropological critique. The global mental health movement (Vikram Patel, Crick Lund) argues for closing the "treatment gap" in low-resource settings through task-shifting and the mhGAP guidelines. Its critics, including Ethan Watters in Crazy Like Us, warn that exporting Western diagnostic categories can overwrite local forms of distress. Suman Fernando and the intercultural psychiatry tradition press further, arguing that racism is structurally embedded in psychiatric classification itself.
Reproduction, gender, and the body
Reproduction has been a central site for medical anthropology because it sits at the junction of biology, technology, kinship, gender, and political economy. Rapp's work on amniocentesis showed how the "tentative pregnancy" redistributes risk and moral responsibility across class lines. Inhorn's studies of in vitro fertilization in the Middle East trace how new reproductive technologies are taken up within constraints of religion, gender, and family obligation — including IVF tourism and the pursuit of parenthood "at any cost." Faye Ginsburg's Contested Lives mapped the moral worlds of abortion activism. Emily Martin's The Woman in the Body showed how medical textbooks script menstruation and childbirth as failure and disorder. Robbie Davis-Floyd argued that hospital birth functions as a rite of passage that encodes technocratic values into the body. The transnational commercial surrogacy industry — studied by Amrita Pande, Kalindi Vora, and Prema Rudrappa — raises questions about whose bodies do the reproductive labor and under what economic compulsion.
Pharmaceuticals and biological citizenship
The anthropology of pharmaceuticals treats the drug as an object that carries culture, capital, and power in a single pill. Sjaak van der Geest and Susan Reynolds Whyte built the field's foundations by asking how medications are prescribed, sold, taken, shared, and hoarded in everyday life. Adriana Petryna's Life Exposed (2002) traced how Chernobyl survivors in Ukraine built claims to state support through biological injury — a status she called biological citizenship. Joseph Dumit's Drugs for Life dissected how pharmaceutical marketing redefines risk to expand the market for preventive medication. Daniel Moerman reframed the placebo effect as the "meaning response," arguing that a drug's efficacy is inseparable from the cultural context of its administration — which is why the same pill works better in some settings than others. Stefan Ecks and Andrew Lakoff have traced pharmaceutical subjectivity in India and Argentina, asking how being a patient becomes a condition of selfhood shaped by global drug circuits.
Epidemics, zoonotic spillover, and One Health
Epidemics concentrate the questions medical anthropology asks, because they lay bare the social production of disease. The HIV/AIDS literature is vast: Paul Treichler called it an "epidemic of signification," and Singer traced its political economy. The Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016 drew anthropologists into real-time engagement: Paul Richards argued that the response failed by ignoring local knowledge and social structure, and Ursula Read and others documented how burial practices became a site of conflict between biomedicine and community. The COVID-19 pandemic reproduced these patterns globally — vaccine hesitancy read as ignorance rather than as a response to histories of medical exploitation, lockdowns falling hardest on those who could not shelter, and "essential" labor revealing who the state treats as expendable. David Quammen's Spillover and Rob Wallace's work on industrial agriculture connect zoonotic emergence to deforestation, factory farming, and the capital-intensive restructuring of the human-animal interface — the terrain of One Health, which insists that human, animal, and environmental health are inseparable.
Disability, aging, and the edges of the category
Disability anthropology, foregrounded by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, studies how cultures define and accommodate bodily and cognitive difference. The field intersects with Deaf studies — Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, and the concept of "Deaf Gain" (Bauman and Murray) that reframes deafness as a linguistic and cultural difference rather than a deficit — and with mad studies, which critiques the psychiatric mainstream from the standpoint of those who have lived through it. Aging and dementia raise their own questions of personhood. Lawrence Cohen's No Aging in India examined senility and the moral status of the elderly; Sarah Lamb and Jason Danely have studied aging in India and Japan respectively; Tom Kitwood's Dementia Reconsidered argued for person-centered care that preserves dignity even as cognition fails. Kaufman's work on the medicalization of dying asks what it means when death itself becomes a managed clinical event rather than a moral and communal one.
Food, nutrition, and the political economy of the body
Food is where biology, political economy, and culture meet most visibly. Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power (1985) showed how sugar tied Caribbean slavery, European industrial labor, and modern diets into a single commodity chain. Amartya Sen's work on famine reframed hunger not as a failure of food supply but as a collapse of entitlement — the set of legal and economic means by which people command food. The critique of nutritionism (Gyorgy Scrinis; Carlos Monteiro's NOVA classification of ultra-processed foods) argues that reducing food to its nutrient components has served industry more than health. Obesity, in this light, is simultaneously a biological and a social phenomenon, distributed along the lines of class and the food environment that capital has built. Food sovereignty — the claim of communities to control their own food systems — emerged as a counter-frame to food security, insisting that the question is not only whether people eat, but on whose terms.
Connections Master
Connections to public health and clinical medicine
Medical anthropology and public health share the goal of improving population health but approach it from different angles. Public health leans toward quantitative methods, randomized trials, and population-level intervention; medical anthropology leans toward qualitative depth, cultural context, and the lived experience of illness and care. The two are most powerful in combination. Mixed-methods studies of vaccination, maternal mortality, and chronic disease management have repeatedly shown that the biological intervention succeeds or fails on terrain that only ethnography maps well. Explanatory models, accompaniment, and syndemics are now part of the vocabulary of global health, and the anthropological insistence that treatment is a matter of justice has reshaped how institutions from the WHO to national ministries frame access to care.
Connections to biology, ecology, and One Health
The boundary between medical anthropology and biological anthropology is porous. Human variation, adaptation, and the evolutionary history of disease all bear on how bodies fall ill and respond to treatment. The emerging One Health framework — which treats human, animal, and environmental health as a single system — draws directly on anthropological work showing that zoonotic spillover, antibiotic resistance, and food-system change are not separable biological events but consequences of how humans have organized agriculture, land use, and markets. The anthropology of the microbiome and of developmental origins of health and disease further dissolves the line between the social and the biological, aligning with Krieger's embodiment thesis.
Connections to history, political economy, and ethics
Structural violence and the political economy of health are, at root, historical arguments. The distribution of tuberculosis, HIV, and maternal mortality across the globe cannot be understood without colonial history, the transatlantic slave trade, debt regimes, and the structure of global trade. Medical anthropology therefore connects directly to political economy, to postcolonial theory, and to the ethics of humanitarian intervention. The question of whether health is a human right — and what obligations follow from answering yes — is one Farmer placed at the center of the field. It connects as well to development studies and the critiques of aid that this curriculum covers in the preceding and succeeding units: the same structures that produce poverty produce disease, and the same modes of intervention that depoliticize poverty tend to depoliticize illness.
Historical and philosophical context Master
From "primitive medicine" to a discipline
The study of non-Western healing began, like much of anthropology, in a colonial register. Early accounts treated indigenous healing as "primitive medicine" — a survival from an earlier stage of evolution, to be catalogued and compared but not taken seriously as knowledge. The shift began in the mid-twentieth century, when anthropologists started working in and around biomedical institutions and realized that biomedicine itself was a cultural system, not a neutral standard against which others could be measured. William Caudill's work in psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s, and the founding of the Society for Medical Anthropology in 1967, marked the discipline's institutional arrival. Arthur Kleinman's work in the 1970s and 1980s gave the field its central distinction — disease versus illness — and its clinical orientation.
The critical turn
The 1980s and 1990s brought a critical turn. Hans Baer and Merrill Singer argued that medical anthropology had taken the political economy of disease too lightly, and they built critical medical anthropology around the claim that disease follows class, race, and the structure of the world-system. Paul Farmer's work in Haiti, beginning in the 1980s, supplied the concept of structural violence and the demonstration — through Partners In Health — that the gap between rich and poor in health outcomes was closable. The concept of the syndemic generalized the critical insight: diseases cluster because conditions cluster. By the turn of the century, the field had moved from cataloguing exotic healers to analyzing the global structures that determine who gets sick, who is treated, and who dies.
Phenomenology and the meaning of suffering
A parallel strand, rooted in phenomenology rather than political economy, asks what illness means to the person who lives through it. Kleinman's turn toward illness narratives, Byron Good's Medicine, Rationality, and Experience (1994), and Cheryl Mattingly's work on the moral stakes of clinical storytelling all insist that suffering is not just a biological event to be managed but a condition in which meaning, identity, and relationship are at stake. This strand resists the reduction of the patient to a body, and it resists equally the reduction of medicine to a set of techniques. The tension between the critical and the phenomenological — between asking who is responsible for suffering and asking what suffering is like — has been productive rather than disabling. It keeps the field honest about both the structures that cause disease and the persons who live with illness.
Bibliography Master
Kleinman, A. (1988). The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. Basic Books.
Farmer, P. (1999). Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. University of California Press.
Farmer, P. (2003). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press.
Singer, M. and Clair, S. (2003). Syndemics and Public Health: Reconceptualizing Disease in Bio-Social Context. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 17(4), 423–441.
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Krieger, N. (2011). Epidemiology and the People's Health: Theory and Context. Oxford University Press.
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Lock, M. (2002). Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. University of California Press.
Inhorn, M. C. (1994). Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Rapp, R. (1999). Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. Routledge.
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Petryna, A. (2002). Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton University Press.
Dumit, J. (2012). Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health. Duke University Press.
Moerman, D. E. (2002). Meaning, Medicine and the Placebo Effect. Cambridge University Press.
Geronimus, A. T. (1992). The Weathering Hypothesis and the Health of African-American Women and Infants. Ethnicity and Disease, 2(3), 207–221.
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Watters, E. (2010). Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Free Press.
Good, B. J. (1994). Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Lock, M. and Nguyen, V.-K. (2018). An Anthropology of Biomedicine (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Viking.
Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Clarendon Press.
Davis-Floyd, R. E. (1992). Birth as an American Rite of Passage. University of California Press.
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Ginsburg, F. D. (1989). Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. University of California Press.
Cohen, L. (1998). No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. University of California Press.
Kaufman, S. R. (2015). Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line. Duke University Press.
Kitwood, T. (1997). Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First. Open University Press.
Quammen, D. (2012). Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. W. W. Norton.
Richards, P. (2016). Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic. Zed Books.
Treichler, P. A. (1999). How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: The Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Duke University Press.
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Pande, A. (2014). Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India. Columbia University Press.