Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter.

Date:
1969
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    international body like the W.H.O. we might see developed a series of current reviews or analyses of indigenous medicine, systems of belief, particular diseases and indigenous materia medica. In the range of the developing nations this perhaps could be carried out co-operatively by physicians with historical interests and by cultural anthropologists. In raising this possibility I am not envisaging superficial little booklets like 'How to be a doctor along the Zambesi'. In some areas we do have a substantial body of knowledge available where cultural anthropologists have done partial pragmatic studies. In other areas we do not, and such information could be put to very practical use both in Western training programmes for physicians in under-developed countries and by Western physicians if they go to under-developed countries to carry out one or two years' exchange work or exchange programmes. It is perhaps no accident that we have had at this conference representatives of five granting agencies and these agencies might consider getting such a project under way, if on reflection they felt it had merit. My second point is that we recognise the need for Western physicians to understand the changing dilemmas of their own cultures and the implications of such change for the practice of medicine. We have acknowledged the difficulties, because of the heavy demands on the time of medical students, of introducing questions on the social and economic aspects of medicine into the medical school curricula. It is also clear that much direction will have to come from the Public Health physician trained in Public Health techniques who holds a prominent role in its government. It may be that in postgraduate Public Health training, more emphasis can be placed on the social and economic aspects of medicine, and some universities in the United States have already introduced this. I hope it will not be long before other countries follow, through the teaching of sociologists, cultural anthropologists and social psychologists who are often overlooked. Finally, I would like to take note of what I thought was a very high calibre of the papers presented, and the very fact that men of such ability take an interest in this Symposium is some guarantee that the ideas expressed will receive some augmentation in the day to day work of our respective countries. chairman: Thank you very much. Professor Keswani. keswani: The very fact that you have collected the best cultural representatives, if I may use the word, of all cultures that have survived up to this time, reminds me of what Charaka said almost 2,000 years ago : that the intelligent should look upon everyone as his teacher, and gather the best in applied therapeutics even when that knowledge comes from the enemy. I am sure that none of us is the