Evolution of Sickness and Healing

Rating:
Summary: Dry and academic but intriguing and useful
Review: 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.