Health, Illness, and Medical Care in Japan

This is one of the first attempts to explore the effects of social, political, and cultural variables on the interpretation of ideas about health, illness, and medical care in a technologically rich society. In this collection of essays, five anthropologists and one political scientist demonstrate that modern medical care in Japan is not a uniform, value-free scientific endeavor, but rather a culturally shaped part of a complex pluralistic medical system that is, itself, the product of a specific historical and social tradition.
The comparative study of health, illness, and medical care provides a rich source of cross-fertilization of ideas among the social sciences. This collection of essays offers new insights on and raises new questions about contemporary Japanese society, biomedicine as a cultural product, and the transformation that occurs when medical knowledge and techniques are used in a different cultural milieu.