Global Health
Meaning "knowledge of life," this traditional Indian healthcare system centers on balancing three aspects of body and mind called doshas.
What is Ayurveda?
ubbed "America's Doctor" after rising to fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show, this physician was subpoenaed to appear before Congress in 2014 over sensationalized weight-loss claims.
Who is Dr. Mehmet Oz?
Rooted in the theory of the four humors, this practice of draining "excess" blood with lancets, fleams, or leeches persisted from ancient Egypt into the 19th century.
What is bloodletting?
In 1898, the drug company Bayer gave diacetylmorphine this heroic-sounding brand name and marketed it as a cough remedy; it made chest infections worse.
What is Heroin?
Medical anthropology's signature research method: long-term participant observation and interviews conducted while living within a community.
What is ethnography?
According to Partners In Health, 1 in 4 people in the world have this disease — the world's deadliest infectious disease, despite treatment being available in wealthy countries.
What is tuberculosis?
Famously critiqued in a NEJM article titled "Miracles and Misinformation," TV dramas portray this emergency resuscitation procedure with success rates far higher than reality.
What is CPR?
(about 7.6%)
Ancient healers performed this procedure — drilling or cutting a hole in the skull — to treat headaches, seizures, and mental disorders, often without anesthesia.
What is trepanning / trepanation?)
First sold in 1935 as Benzedrine for narcolepsy and nasal congestion, this stimulant class was handed out by the hundreds of thousands to U.S. troops in WWII before being moved to Schedule II under the Controlled Substances Act.
What are amphetamines?
The first subfield of medical anthropology to develop, it studies the health beliefs, practices, and healing traditions of specific ethnic and Indigenous groups.
What is ethnomedicine?
This West African nation of 8 million people has only 3 psychiatrists, a single dedicated mental health hospital, and a 1-in-20 lifetime risk that a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth.
What is Sierra Leone?
In the Frontiers study of Grey's Anatomy and House, M.D., gloves, gowns, and masks were used correctly in over 80% of procedures — yet this most basic infection-control practice appeared on screen in only about 10% of cases.
What is handwashing?
Angelo Mariani's coca-leaf wine tonic, endorsed by Pope Leo XIII, sold so briskly in the U.S. that it inspired John Pemberton to create this iconic beverage.
What is Coca-Cola?
This 1914 U.S. federal law outlawed non-prescription cocaine — a drug that had been endorsed by the Surgeon General of the Army and used as replacement therapy for morphine addicts.
What is the Harrison Narcotic Act?
This anthropologist's 1952 paper is credited with first identifying medical anthropology as a distinct field; he also spent two months secretly living as a patient in the Yale Psychiatric Institute to study hospital social life.
Who is William Caudill?
Indonesians have sipped this turmeric, ginger, and tamarind tonic since the 8th century; UNESCO added it to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2023.
What is jamu?
While covering the 2010 Haiti earthquake, this CNN physician-journalist became "part of the story" by treating patients on camera, sparking a debate over whether doctors can report and practice at the same time.
Who is Dr. Sanjay Gupta?
Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Medicine for deliberately infecting syphilis patients with this mosquito-borne disease, using its high fevers to treat their psychosis before "curing" it with quinine.
What is malaria?
Developed in Germany as an appetite suppressant and a U.S. Schedule I drug since 1985, this "party drug" was reclassified by Australia's regulator in 2023 to permit medical use, following more than 6,000 public submissions.
What is MDMA / ecstasy?
Shirley Lindenbaum's early-1960s fieldwork among the Fore of highland New Guinea — an "epidemiology of social relations" — helped prove this fatal disease, which the Fore blamed on sorcery, spread through the ritual consumption of deceased relatives.
What is kuru?
Once taught to Japanese schoolchildren as part of their daily exercise routine, this practice — literally "a rubdown with a dry towel" — is believed to stimulate circulation and ward off colds.
What is kanpu masatsu?
Communication scholars use this hyphenated term for deliberately embedding health messages in fictional media — a strategy shown to raise awareness of breast cancer, HIV prevention, and alcohol use through TV storylines.
What is entertainment-education, or E-E?
Practicing what he called "sympathetic magic," Sir Kenelm Digby claimed his 17th-century Powder of Sympathy (ground earthworms, pigs' brains, rust, and mummy bits) would heal a duelist's wound when applied to this object, while the injury itself went untreated.
What is "The weapon that inflicted the wound"
Despite more than 4,000 years of documented medical use, cannabis was defined as having no medical value under this 1961 UN treaty — a designation David Nutt argues has crippled research for over half a century.
What is the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs?
Introduced by Hans Baer in the early 1980s, this branch of the discipline turns the lens on power itself, examining how political-economic structures and the "cultural hegemony of biomedicine" shape health and illness.
What is critical medical anthropology?