Overview
- Puts forth a theoretical proposition to examine medical care not only as an issue of provisioning but also of practice
- Demonstrates the use of multi-site ethnography in understanding societal discourses that are ambiguous, especially in the context of an epidemic
- Calls for the need to humanize medicine, using the case of fevers care in Kerala
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
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About this book
This book is an ethnographic work that uses a critical medical anthropology approach to examine the concept of fever care in the context of southern India. Through a study of fevers, the study provides a critical overview to medical practice itself, as it is said that the history of fevers is also the history of medicine. This association between fevers and medicine is as relevant today, as this in-depth study of fever care reveals. Acknowledging the central role of health institutions in creating and propagating notions about illness in society, the author examines fever care through a study of hospitals.
The study examines various discourses on fevers prevalent in the southern state of Kerala, which influence policy and programmatic dimensions of the state health services system. Fever care implies those aspects related to provisioning and cost involved among public and private sector hospitals. A second and more important dimension of this book is a critique of the culture of biomedical practice, informed by the social constructivist framework and approaches in the field of science studies. Overall, the book studies the processes by which physical symptoms like fever are treated as epidemics to be controlled, and are therefore brought within a biomedical system, thereby opening up options for commercialization of care.
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Keywords
- fever care in allopathic hospitals
- history of fevers
- culture of fever care
- Medicalization of fever
- Illness Narratives
- discourse of fever management
- risk discourse of an epidemic
- anthropological analysis of epidemics
- risk discourse in public health practice
- medicalization of society
- perceived morbidity in Kerala
- medical care in Travancore
- health-seeking behaviour
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Mathew George, MPH, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Chairperson of the Centre for Public Health, School of Health Systems Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He has training in public health with a doctorate in social medicine and community health from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. His research interest is in the field of sociology of health and illness with special emphasis on the sociology of medical practice and medical knowledge in bio-medicine and also the interaction between multiple systems of medicine. Currently, he is working on the scope of restructuring the Indian health services system from a public health perspective, using a social epidemiological approach.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Institutionalizing Illness Narratives
Book Subtitle: Discourses on Fever and Care from Southern India
Authors: Mathew George
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1905-0
Publisher: Springer Singapore
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-10-1904-3Published: 11 August 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-10-9473-6Published: 22 April 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-981-10-1905-0Published: 01 August 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVI, 169
Topics: Medical Anthropology, Public Health, Philosophy of Medicine