First, we need to ask:  What is anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of humankind from its beginnings millions of years ago to the present.  The discipline of anthropology, in its main divisions, consists of archaeology, cultural (social) anthropology, biological (physical) anthropology and linguistics.

The specialty of medical anthropology focuses on the interactions among health, behavior and biology. This approach to understanding health and disease grows out the tradition of holism in anthropology.

Anthropology is not just holistic, it is also populational.

What is a population?

We are all more or less familiar with the concept of population as "a group of individual persons, objects, or items from which samples are taken for statistical measurement."  However, population also refers to the whole number of people or inhabitants in a country or region and to a group of individuals having a quality or characteristic in common and in evolutionary biology, a group of interbreeding organisms that represents the level of organization at which speciation begins. [more definitions of population]

Community vs. Clinical

1. variation as natural
2. health and treatment involve social as well as biological consideration
   1. What is health?
   2. How do you treat illness

Temporal, for example the study of health and disease in ancient populations.

Evolutionary,

Evolutionary Medicine

Sensitivity v. Specificity

Olsen, Carolyn L. (1989) Applied collaborative biomedical anthropology in a state health department setting. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 3: 377-384.

Schell, Lawrence M. and Stark, Alice D. (1989) Biomedical anthropology in a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research project: the Albany lead study. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 3: 385-394.

Ward, Richard E. and Sadove, A. Michael (1989) Biomedical anthropology and the team approach to craniofacial surgery. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 3: 395-404.

Maretzki, Thomas W. (1989) Cultural variation in biomedicine: the Kur in West Germany. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 3: 22-35.

Barfield, Thomas [ed.] (1997) Dictionary of Anthropology. Blackwell Publishing.

Brown, Peter J. [ed.] (1998) Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology. Mayfield Publishing Co.: Mountain View, California.

Greene, Lawrence S. and Danubio, Maria Enrica [eds.] (1997) Adaptation to Malaria. The interaction of biology and culture. Gordon and Breach Publishers. [read review]

Inhorn, Marcia C. and Brown, Peter J. [eds] (1997) The Anthropology of Infectious Disease. Gordon and Breach Publishers. [read review]