Illness and death are significant events for people everywhere. No one is spared. But medical beliefs and practices are
not the same everywhere. How people understand the causes of illness and death and how they cope with these events
vary from culture to culture. It is not surprising therefore that medical practitioners and others are becoming increasingly
aware of the need to understand the influence of society and culture on medical belief and practice. Culture—
the customary ways of thinking and acting in a society—often affects the outcome of illness, and even which illnesses
occur. So those who are actively engaged in studying health and illness are coming to realize that biological and
cultural factors need to be considered if we are to reduce human suffering.
The professional medicine of Western cultures has been called “biomedicine,” because it mostly deals with the
biology of the human body. But biomedicine, like the medicine of other cultures, is also influenced by conditions and
beliefs in the culture, and therefore reflects the value and norms of its creators. So, if biomedicine is socially
constructed and not just based on science, its beliefs and practices may partly derive from assumptions and biases in
the culture. For example, it used to be thought that some people refrained from drinking milk because they were ignorant.
Now, biomedicine realizes that the avoidance of milk is a rational response to the likelihood that drinking milk
results in diarrhea and other discomforts in people who lack an enzyme (lactase) that allows easy digestion of the
sugar in milk (lactose). Anthropologists were the first to realize that drinking milk would cause serious problems for
many people. The anthropologists’ fieldwork in other cultures around the world revealed that people in many places
that have milking animals must sour the milk before they can drink it, to reduce or eliminate the sugar in it that would
otherwise make them sick.
Severe diarrhea may also be an effect of the culture’s system of social stratification. The direct causes of the
diarrhea may be biological, in the sense that the deaths are caused by bacterial or other infection. But why are so
many infants exposed to those infectious agents? Usually, the main reason is social or cultural. The affected infants
may mostly be poor. Because they are poor, they are likely to live with infected drinking water. Similarly, malnutrition
may be the biological result of a diet poor in protein. But such a diet is usually also a cultural phenomenon, reflecting
a society that has different classes of people, with very unequal access to the necessities of life, and unequal access
to decent medical care. For this and other reasons, medical anthropology is developing what has been called
a “biocultural synthesis” in its studies of health and illness.
Medical anthropology may even be in the forefront of the movement that is returning the entire field of anthropology
to its biocultural roots. In any case, the growth of jobs in medical anthropology is one of the more striking
developments in contemporary anthropology. Medical anthropology has developed into a very popular specialty, and
the Society for Medical Anthropology is now the second largest unit in the American Anthropological Association.