The interspersed case studies tend to be somewhat wooden, but, given the space and objectivity necessary for textbook use, they still make a contribution. The appendix includes concise outlines covering each chapter, which are a ready guide for the practitioners to direct their inquiries. The references and author and subject indexes are quite thorough. In reading this text we begin to think, imagine, and create concepts about health and illness that translate between and within cultures. The book emphasizes and creates language that clarifies phenomena such as what technology does to us.
Medical anthropology helps determine priorities for cultures.
But because the Japanese have a communal rather than an individualistic understanding of each other, not a single transplant operation has been performed. Applying the yardstick of anthropology to AIDS, we learn that the epidemic is abetted by the fact that in a city in New Jersey prostitutes do not use condoms with their intravenous drug user boyfriends and in Brazil the passive person in the homosexual relationship is socially unacceptable while the active member is accepted. Some traditional cultures inform us that the deceased person's spirit remains present after physical death. Therefore, physical death precedes social death. In the United States driven by deep belief in better living through chemistry and technology, cardiopulmonary resuscitation within a decade of its development for acute cardiac events was applied to nearly everyone who was dying.