The term "medical anthropology" has been used since 1963 as a label for empirical research and theoretical production by anthropologists into the social processes and cultural representations of health, illness and the nursing/care practices associated with these.
[6] General anthropology occupied a notable position in the basic medical sciences (which correspond to those subjects commonly known as pre-clinical).
[7][8] The hegemony of hospital clinical education and of experimental methodologies suggested by Claude Bernard relegate the value of the practitioners' everyday experience, which was previously seen as a source of knowledge represented by the reports called medical geographies and medical topographies both based on ethnographic, demographic, statistical and sometimes epidemiological data.
A book by Saillant & Genest describes development of medical anthropology as a field of study, and some of the main theoretical and intellectual actual debates.
Furthermore, studying the rituals surrounding popular therapies served to challenge Western psychopathological categories, as well as the relationship in the West between science and religion.
In the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, collaboration between anthropology and medicine was initially concerned with implementing community health programs among ethnic and cultural minorities and with the qualitative and ethnographic evaluation of health institutions (hospitals and mental hospitals) and primary care services.
Regarding the community health programs, the intention was to resolve the problems of establishing these services for a complex mosaic of ethnic groups.
They also contributed new methodological criteria for evaluating the new institutions resulting from the reforms as well as experimental care techniques such as therapeutic communities.
The ethnographic evidence supported the criticisms of the institutional custodialism and contributed decisively to policies of deinstitutionalizing psychiatric and social care in general and led to in some countries such as Italy, a rethink of the guidelines on education and promoting health.
These include: developing international and community health programs in developing countries; evaluating the influence of social and cultural variables in the epidemiology of certain forms of psychiatric pathology (transcultural psychiatry); studying cultural resistance to innovation in therapeutic and care practices; analysing healing practices toward immigrants; and studying traditional healers, folk healers and empirical midwives who may be reinvented as health workers (the so-called barefoot doctors).
Also, since the 1960s, biomedicine in developed countries has been faced by a series of problems which stipulate inspection of predisposing social or cultural factors, which have been reduced to variables in quantitative protocols and subordinated to causal biological or genetic interpretations.
In all these fields, local and qualitative ethnographic research is indispensable for understanding the way patients and their social networks incorporate knowledge on health and illness when their experience is nuanced by complex cultural influences.
[19] The following books present a global panorama on international medical anthropology, and can be useful as handbooks for beginners, students interested or for people who need a general text on this topic.