CRITICAL ISSUE AREAS IN MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY. Social Sciences Essay (Essay Sample)

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An Examination of Critical Issue Areas in Medical Anthropology
1 How culture shapes the interaction between healer and patient (around 400 words)
Culture plays a key role in shaping the interaction between the patient and the healer. Within the parlance of medical anthropology, this case is vindicated in medical training where the authority of the healer (doctor or student-doctor) finds overarching dominion over the patient who is but the ‘lifeless’ cadaver. This socially-feared or even dreaded healer-patient relationship between the doctor and the human cadaver is considered so socially apprehensive that cadaver stories have become a commonplace means of construing the anatomical laboratory experience (Hafferty, 345). In that regard thereof, Hafferty (345) opines that such cadaver stories signify primordial or rather innate fears within most medical students that cadavers have the propensity of causing emotional instability, killing or even horrifying those with a relatively weak emotional stability. From these above-explained examples of healer-patient relationships vivid in the relationship between the doctor or in-training medical students and the cadaver, it becomes manifest that socially-constructed cultural imaginations ascribed to the cadaver have a relatively great bearing in dictating the extent and type of interaction between the healer and the attendant patient.