Medical Anthropology

Overview

You will develop a deeper understanding of how people’s ideas about the world, as well as the structural constraints within which they find themselves, have an impact on their understanding and experience of health, sickness and disease.

You’ll achieve this through close study of key texts in medical anthropology, the original fieldwork experiences of your lecturers, and through designing and undertaking your own research project.

The Medical Anthropology programme from Brunel University London will address questions such as:

• How does poverty contribute to the profiles of diseases such as diabetes and tuberculosis?

• Why are some diseases, such as leprosy or AIDS/HIV, feared and stigmatized?

• Why do some biomedical interventions seeking to control infectious and non-infectious diseases work, and others fail?

• What might stop some patients seeking conventional treatments for cancers and other conditions – even when they are offered for free – despite the apparent efficacy of the medicines available?

Students take the opportunity of fieldwork to travel to a wide variety of locations across the world that have included India, Mexico, Bolivia, Papua New Guinea, China, Nepal, Peru, Morocco, and New Zealand as well as in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Careers and your future

Hundreds of students – doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, social workers and other medical professionals among them – can testify to the quality of our programme, having used it either to enhance their professional practice, to change career or to develop their research interests for future studies.

Students will acquire analytical and research skills that can be used in a wide range of careers. In particular the course is ideal for enhancing professional development in fields such as midwifery, general practice, sexual health, psychiatry, nutrition, psychotherapy, public health, non-governmental agencies and international development.

Some of our graduates also go on to do further research for a PhD in medical anthropology.