Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 What's So Cultural about Disease? -- Culture in Medicine -- Disease in Other Cultures and Times -- The Impact of Culture on Contemporary Biomedicine -- Development of Medical Anthropology -- Health as a Measure of Social Standing -- Medicine as a Social Process with Functional Purpose -- The Applied Roots of Medical Anthropology -- Medical Anthropology Today -- Summary: Placing Medical Anthropology among the Social Sciences of Medicine -- Suggested Readings -- Notes -- 2 Anthropological Questions and Methods in the Study of Sickness and Healing -- Studying Shamans in Peru -- Research Questions -- Research Methods -- From Fieldwork to Analysis and Interpretation -- Studying Medicine in the United States -- Organ Transplantation as an Anthropological Subject -- Research Questions -- Research Methods -- Summary: The Anthropological Vision -- Suggested Readings -- Notes -- 3 Recognizing Biological, Social, and Cultural Interconnections: Evolutionary and Ecological Perspectives on a Cholera Epidemic -- Thinking about Epidemics -- History and Biology of Cholera -- Epidemiological Accounts of Peru's Cholera Epidemic -- Evolution and the Ecological Framework -- Cholera and the Evolutionary Framework -- Medical Anthropology Embraces the Ecological/Evolutionary Model -- Suggested Readings -- Notes -- 4 Expanding the Vision of Medical Anthropology: Critical and Interpretive Views of the Cholera Epidemic -- Political Economy of Cholera -- Political-Economic versus Ecological/Evolutionary Perspectives -- Interpretive View of Cholera -- Taking a Broader, Inclusive Perspective -- Suggested Readings -- Notes -- 5 The Global Petri Dish -- Transitions -- SARS: The First Global Epidemic of the Twenty-First Century -- Ebola: Out of the Forest