Health, illness and disability and Margaret Mead
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | International Journal on Disability and Human Development |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | http://www.novapublishers.org/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=125_3623&products_id=66239 |
| Keywords | Margaret Mead; medicine; child development; adolescence; disability; autobiography; ethnographic writing |
| Description | The anthropologist Margaret Mead lectured at the National Institute of Mental Health during the Second War World and her work was published by the Institute, but her papers rarely appeared in medical journals. Objectives: I will discuss the appearance of the following themes, which mainly appeared in Mead’s autobiography: child develop- ment, adolescence and disability. These topics are sometimes described generally and in other cases in detail, so further reading from other of her books is needed. Regarding the scientific validity of her arguments I searched medical journals for papers discussing her contribution to these and related themes. Methods: PubMed database was searched for papers where the keyword Margaret Mead, child development, adolescence and disability were used. Later, snowballing search technique was used to search for more medical articles on Margaret Mead. Results: Though Mead’s autobiography attracts attention to themes related to health, illness and disability, I suggest that further readings of her published works are needed to understand fully her ideas. Conclusions: The contribution of Margaret Mead to medicine could be significant, but the fact that her major ideas in this field could not make their ways to medical literature blocked her way to the mainstream of modern medicine in these areas. Exposing the medical community to research from other disciplines, not published in medical databases is of a great significance. From the case of Mead, we learn that evidence relevant to medicine could reside in non-medical publications, even in autobiographies and other genres. |
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