2 - The Origins of an Integrated Approach in Anthropology and Epidemiology

Summary

Medical anthropology and epidemiology began from a common objective, namely to explain the health of human populations using observational techniques. But with a few notable exceptions, medical anthropologists and epidemiologists rarely had much to do with one another until the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Epidemiologists interested in history commonly trace the origins of their discipline back 2400 years to Hippocratic texts, particularly, Airs, Waters, Places, which emphasized environmental factors (seasons, winds, water, position, and soil) in disease causation. But Hippocrates also discussed diseases as attributes of populations, and he emphasized the etiologic significance of the “mode of life” of a town's populace: “whether they are heavy drinkers, taking lunch, and inactive; or athletic, industrious, eating much and drinking little” (Hippocrates 1957:73). Thus an interest in what today might be called “behavioral” or “social” causes of disease predates the terms themselves and certainly comes long before the scientific disciplines organized to investigate them.

Today we divide such health-related knowledge into such fields as medical anthropology, social epidemiology, medical sociology, bioinformatics, and psychoneuroimmunology. Such labeling seems both inevitable and natural – it is hard to think about how else we might categorize our knowledge. But of course, the boundaries between disciplines are not sacrosanct. Integrating knowledge across disciplines involves both communicating ideas across them and recognizing, respecting, and using ideas from multiple disciplines.