Medical Anthropology at the Intersections

Abstract

It may be hard to believe, but the discipline of medical anthropology is now nearly 50 years old. In 1959, one of the first references to "medical anthropology" was made in a article by a physician-anthropologist named James Roney, entitled "Medical Anthropology: A Synthetic Discipline" (Roney 1959). Craig Janes and I discovered this in our research for an article, just published in the new journal Global Public Health, on the legacy of our University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) mentor, Frederick Dunn (Inhorn and Janes 2007). Fred, along with Roney, Charles Leslie, Margaret Clark, Benjamin Paul, and George Foster, were among the founders of our field. When both Ben Paul and George Foster passed away in their nineties this May, within about one week of each other, many of you replied to my e-mail announcement by saying that "an era" had passed in medical anthropology.