The Medical Committee is concerned with anthropological research and teaching relating to health, sickness, medicine and health care around the world. It provides information and advisory support to the Royal Anthropological Institute on these matters and also aims to promote anthropological perspectives and understandings among non-anthropologists working in health-related fields. It provides a UK platform for contact between people teaching courses in medical anthropology, a means for those trained in medical anthropology but working outside academia to keep in touch with the discipline, and a forum for those who seek to advance medical anthropology either within anthropology departments or in clinical or other health care contexts.

The Committee monitors the state of medical anthropology in Europe and beyond on behalf of the RAI, participates in networking initiatives among medical anthropologists and takes an active role in most UK-based conferences and meetings concerned with medical anthropology.

What is medical anthropology and what do medical anthropologists do?

Medical Anthropology represents the application of anthropological understanding and methods to issues of health, sickness and suffering. Whilst generally a sub-discipline within social and cultural anthropology, medical anthropology in this wide sense extends to the work of biological anthropologists (for example in population genetics and ecology), archaeologists (e.g. paleopathology), ethnologists and psychologists (e.g. cognition in non human primates), and physicians, nurses and other health professionals (conceptualisations of sickness, pathways into professional care). As a body of knowledge, medical anthropology owes a considerable debt to other disciplines which include biomedicine, history and sociology, development and area studies, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, linguistics and philosophy.

By contrast, a Medical Anthropologist, for research appointments and job descriptions, is someone (i) trained in one or more of the major divisions of anthropology – most commonly social/cultural anthropology – and (ii) whose major areas of research and publication include medical anthropology. In the overwhelming majority of instances this would necessitate a research degree awarded by a university department that is based on original research. Possession of a master’s degree in medical anthropology does not in itself constitute a professional qualification as a ‘medical anthropologist’ any more than a master’s degree in any other specialisation within anthropology.

For another description of medical anthropology and what medical anthropologists do, see http://www.medanthro.net/definition.html

About the Committee

The individual members of the Committee have a wide range of institutional affiliations and health-related interests. There is a representative of every University department in the U.K. that offers a postgraduate degree course (MA or MSc) in medical anthropology. Other members are based in non-anthropological institutions in which medical anthropology has a presence, including centres of nursing, psychiatry, health services research, public health, social medicine and sociology. The current composition of a dozen members provides specialist knowledge in key areas of both theoretical and applied anthropology including interests in medical pluralism, Chinese, Indian and African traditions of medicine, organisational ethnography of health systems, gender and violence, colonialism and mental health, stroke, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections and reproductive health, developing methodologies for research in health care settings, new roles and technologies in nursing, genetic screening, and evidence-based medicine. The committee members also have teaching experience in devising, composing and examining courses at all levels for Nursing, Medical and Social Science students in various settings, from colleges to universities and from undergraduates to doctorates. Many of the committee members sit on editorial boards of the main medical anthropology journals. The current committee members are:

Kit Davies (Sociology and Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, London U)

Sophie Day (Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London U) has carried out fieldwork in Ladakh, North India and in Europe, mostly in London. She is currently completing a restudy of sex work in London (supported by the Wellcome Trust), and a European project on HIV prevention among prostitutes (supported by the European Commission, see www.europap.net).

Ronnie Frankenberg (School of Social Relations, Keele U & Department of Human Sciences, Social Anthropology, Brunel U) initially taught Medical Sociology in Social Medicine Department of Manchester Medical School. Research alongside (different) epidemiologists, three years; Paths to Medical Care in Lusaka, Zambia, (acting Dean of Medical School and Chair of Hospital Planning Committee); three years in local health authority in Florence Province. Present research on misuse of allegedly anthropological concepts in Health Service Policy making. Rfrank1251@aol.com

Wenzel Geissler (Social Anthropology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)

Elizabeth Hart (School of Nursing, Nottingham U) conducted doctoral research in the North Staffordshire Potteries and has since done fieldwork in four different hospitals, blending medical and organisational anthropology. She is director of the Centre for Social and Cultural Research in Stroke. liz.hart@nottingham.ac.uk

Elisabeth Hsu (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Green College, Oxford University) is coordinator of the M Sc and M Phil courses in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her current research interests include Chinese medicine in East Africa and Chinese pulse diagnostics which she explores in the context of a project on medicine and the senses. For further information, see http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/medical/medical.htm

Sushrut Jadhav (Psychiatry, University College London) is Editor of Anthropology & Medicine & co-director, UCL M.Sc. in Culture & Health. Recent research include illness experience of depression among white Anglo-Saxon Britons, folk models of mental illness across cultures, impact of western psychiatry on the training and practice of psychiatry and mental health in developing countries, European psychiatry as ethno-psychiatry, stigma, homelessness, & mental health dimensions of caste. s.jadhav@ucl.ac.uk
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychiatry/staff/rejusxj.htm

Helen Lambert (Social Medicine, Bristol U), chair of the Medical Committee, does research in India and the United Kingdom and teaches u/g and p/g medical and public health students. Interests include medical pluralism and treatment-seeking, popular perceptions of biomedical science, sexual and reproductive health in South Asia and notions of evidence in anthropology, biomedicine and health research. http://www.epi.bris.ac.uk

Roland Littlewood (Anthropology and Psychiatry, University College London) Fieldwork in Trinidad, Haiti, Lebanon and Albania. Seven books, 50 plus papers. Director of the UCL Medical Anthropology Centre.

Rebecca Marsland (Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh)

Maryon McDonald (Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

Christopher McKevitt (Department of Public Health Sciences, King's College, London) conducted doctoral research on saint cults and pilgrimage in southern Italy. His current research focuses on chronic illness, particularly stroke and the social construction of medical notions of quality of life. christopher.mckevitt@kcl.ac.uk

Melissa Parker (Centre for Research in International Medical Anthropology, Brunel University)

Jan Savage (Royal College of Nursing, London) ) conducted doctoral research on understandings of 'blood' among urban English women, and explored perceptions of relatedness in the context of new reproductive technologies. She has carried out fieldwork in hospital and primary care settings and is interested in the use of ethnography in clinical contexts and in the role of the body in nursing and in participant observation. She is convenor for the London Ethnography and Health care Group.

Robert Simpson (Anthropology, Durham University)

Further resources

The website of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA) of the U.S.A.-based American Anthropological Association (AAA) contains useful information, contacts and news in the field of medical anthropology: http://www.medanthro.net/

Peer-reviewed English-language journals that publish academic papers in the field of medical anthropology include Anthropology and Medicine (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/carfax/13648470.html), Culture, Health and Sexuality (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13691058.html), Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/01459740.html) and Medical Anthropology Quarterly (http://www.aaanet.org).