Epidemiology, social history, and the beginnings of medical anthropology in the highlands of New Guinea

Abstract

Shirley Lindenbaum’s study in the early 1960s of the origins and transmission of kuru among the Fore people of the eastern highlands of New Guinea is one of the earliest examples of an explicitly medical anthropology. Lindenbaum later described her investigations as assembling ‘an epidemiology of social relations’. How might the emergence of medical anthropology, then, be related to the concurrent development of the social history of medicine and global epidemic intelligence? Are these alternative genealogies for medical anthropology?

Keywords

• medical anthropology
• kuru
• disease
• epidemiology
• social history
• lindenbaum