Evolution of Sickness and Healing [Paperback]

Horacio Fábrega Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 6, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0520219538 | ISBN-13: 978-0520219533 | Edition: 1

Evolution of Sickness and Healing is a theoretical work on the grand scale, an original synthesis of many disciplines in social studies of medicine. Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, Horacio Fàbrega, Jr. 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 new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine.
To show how this complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, and how it is expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of human societies, Fàbrega traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy. Health scientists and medical practitioners, along with medical historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, now have the opportunity to consider every essential aspect of medicine within an integrated framework.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Inside Flap

"Establishing a theoretical base and framework for future studies in this new field of 'medical evolution,' the book is important and will be read and referred back to for years to come."--Frederick L. Dunn, University of California, San Francisco

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Product Details

• Paperback: 379 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (July 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520219538
• ISBN-13: 978-0520219533
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,249,182 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dry and academic but intriguing and useful, November 25, 2002

By 

R. Kelly Wagner "[e-mail]" (MD, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evolution of Sickness and Healing (Paperback)

I stumbled across this book from the University of California Press when I was looking for source material on "societal development." If you're a graduate student at certain universities, you'll recognize that general topic as something you may have to write 30 or 60 pages on someday. As it later happened, my "breadth" paper on societal development went in a different direction, but this book was interesting reading anyway.

Fabrega discusses how our view of illness has changed, how our treatment of illness have changed, and how different societies have different views of illness. For example, things treated as medical disorders in Western society - obesity, cosmetic defects - may not be treated as a medical issue at all in other societies. He also discusses the possibility that humans have specifically evolved an adaptation for sickness and healing, which he calls the SH adaptation. That is, that there have been evolutionary advantages to some people in being sick, and advantages to other people in being the sort of person who helps the sick. This point of view can be compared with Robert Sapolsky's (_Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers_) since both Fabrega and Sapolsky discuss illness in our primate cousins, the chimpanzees. Fabrega's approach is more ethonological/anthropological, while Sapolsky's is more biology, and Sapolsky's book is written more for a popular audience. Both have interesting things to say about our perception of and treatment of mental illnesses. One could completely round out a paper about how society shapes the concept of illness, and how diseases, epidemics, etc. have shaped society, by reading Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs and Steel_ and, if one had time, Hans Zinsser's _Rats, Lice and History_, an "autobiography" of typhus.

Chapter subtitles include: *"Sickness and Healing and the Problem of Social Change and Evolution;" "Conjuring Up the Archaeology and Prehistory of Sickness and Healing;" "Sickness Cheating;" "Sickness and Healing in Chiefdom, Prestate, and State Societies;" "The Higher Prevalence of Psychiatric Disorders" and so on. There are discussions of traditional Chinese medicine, the Islamic view of medicine and healing, and other non-Western aspects, so that this book is not limited to "Western" medicine.

This wouldn't be the very first book I'd read on the topic- it's academic enough to scare off a casual reader - but it's definitely an interesting resource for those interested in how society is reflected by its treatment of the sick.