Medical Anthropology

Translation:  Hallberg Brynjar Guðmundsson 

Anthropology is an academic field that focuses its research on human behavior and culture. This article will be divided into two sections. One about social anthropology and the other about biological anthropology. 

Medical anthropology is one of the subcategories of the field, it studies human health from an anthropological point of view, i.e., human behavior. It concerns itself with physical, environmental, and cultural factors, in other words one’s social life, class division and their effects on one’s well-being. Furthermore, the field tries to understand how people perceive their health and that of others in various ways based on social type and class. In all human communities one can find a type of healthcare system. Either private or public health systems try to explain various diseases, how they are diagnosed and how to combat them, along with various opinions on one’s health. Medical anthropology examines the aforementioned systems, especially the relationship between doctors and patients. The interplay of the medical system, how people deal with the health system, people’s attitudes towards their health, and how people perceive health and disease are important perspectives within health anthropology.

A Research on COVID-19 and its effects on children and teenagers in Iceland

Mynd: Aðsend frá viðmælanda

Eva Hrönn Árelíusdóttir Jörgensen is a PhD student of anthropology at HÍ. Her doctrine is about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and teenagers in Iceland, both the effects that the pandemic has already had on that focus group and the future implication it might have on the group. Eva’s research is ongoing and therefore it is impossible to generalize her results just yet. However, it does not take a genius to see that the pandemic has had an effect on their mental health and well-being, as with people of all age groups. Eva has noticed that the participants of her research experienced an altered view on their relationships and how they communicate with one another. For example, how the pandemic affected one’s behavior in terms of friend groups, what group one should prioritize, and so forth. Additionally, Eva’s focus group reported that they had used their free time in creative efforts and pursued online friendships that corresponded to their hobbies. Eva’s doctoral research gives a good indication on how children and teenagers in Iceland coped with COVID-19by making the best of what they got. Eva also wants to highlight the resilience she found in the group. 

Alongside her doctorate, Eva is writing an article about the situation of children in the COVID-19 pandemic with a team of pediatricians for The International Society for Social Pediatrics & Child Health. Their teamwork is just one example of how medical anthropology is intertwined with the field of general medicine. With medical anthropologists and doctors working together, the former focusing on the science between the social part of public health, the latter focusing on the medical science. 

Field-Research and Ethnographs

After doing field research anthropologists log in their results in ethnographs. An ethnograph consists of field descriptions and results of anthropological research. Eva recommends the following ethnographs to anyone interested in anthropology; The Private Worlds of Dying Children and In the Shadow of Illness by Myra Bluebond-Langner, The Illness Narratives by Arthur Kleinman, and The Body Multiple by Annemarie Mol. 

The Private Worlds of Dying Children is about children who suffer from cancer, the social and cultural factors that come into play when considering the communications between the child, their parents, and public health workers, and how these different groups can talk about and prepare for serious loss, i.e., a death of a child. In the Shadow of Illness by the same author is an examination of children with chronic illness, their families, and the effects the illness has on their siblings. 

In The Illness Narrative Arthur Kleinman writes about how an individual is defined as a patient, both within the healthcare system and how the patient defines themselves. Kleinman highlights the importance of handling one’s health not just from a biological point of view but also an anthropological one. The Body Multiple by Annemarie Mol looks at how Western medicine treats the body and disease, and the interplay of medicine and treatment, i.e. how certain views inside medicinal science contribute to how a certain disease is treated in different ways, depending on the time period.     

Medical anthropology is a grand academic field and there exists numerous other research about this subject. Medical anthropology is intertwined with traditional and non-traditional medicine and everything in between. As previously stated, it is a field that examines the relationship between doctors and patients, and how people perceive their own well-being.