Evolution of Sickness & Healing - Hardcover

Fabrega, Horacio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520206096 ISBN 13: 9780520206090

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, this work presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution. This linking of sickness and healing, as inseparable facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line, offers a point from which to examine medicine. The author traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. As well as offering a conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in revolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy.

About this title

Review:

"Heretofore, sociobiologists have had relatively little to say to orthodox medicine. Fabrega seeks to remedy this reticence by applying sociobiologic theory to sickness and healing behavior from the beginnings of the human presence on Earth to the present."--Robert Martensen, "New England Journal of Medicine

About the Author:

Horacio Fabrega Jr., M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Disease and Social Behavior (1980) and, with Daniel Silver, Illness and Shamanistic Curing in Zinacantan (1973).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0520206096
• ISBN 13: 9780520206090
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 392