Relationships between Society, Culture, and Biomedicine: An Introduction to the Essays

Abstract

The essays in this volume demonstrate the interdependence of biomedicine, society and culture. The authors, for the most part using an ethnographic approach, show how language, values, metaphor, ritual practices, institutions, and social organization, among other variables, contribute to the creation of ideas about contemporary medical theory and to clinical practice. In particular these essays demonstrate how cultural and social variables function to support certain assumptions about the natural order, the “reality” of disease, and their “rational” management, very frequently through the use of technological intervention. Although the argument in most of the articles is developed around specific issues or case studies, several common themes, which we will briefly consider, recur frequently throughout the essays.