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jaostrander

Byron J. Good is a medical anthropologist and Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard. Good's writings have primarily focused on the cultural  meaning of mental illnesses, patient narratives of illness, and development of mental health systems.

pece_annotation_1481641945

jaostrander

"As a result, however, the stories were often quite ambiguous as to the nature of the illness, and it was often unclear whether the stories were "reports of experience" or were largely governed by a typical cultural form or narrative structure"

"Stories, perhaps better than other forms, provide a glimpse of the grand ideas that often seem to elude life and defy rational description. Illness stories often seem to provide an especially fine mesh for catching such ideas. 

"much of what we know about illness we know through stories - stories told by the sick about their experiences, by family members, doctors, healers, and others in the society. This is a simple fact. "An illness" has a narrative structure, although it is not a closed text, and it is composed as a corpus of stories."

pece_annotation_1481641657

jaostrander

This article focuses in on the cutural beliefs that influence how a patient may interpret and relay the "narrartive" of their disease. The article shows a connection  between the physical impact of a disease on a patient, how the disease is percieved in their culture, and how they describe the disease and seek treatment for it.