The Idea of Medicalization: An Anthropological Perspective

The idea that there is taking place a medicalization in contemporary society seems to imply that attitudes and concerns which properly should be directed at "medical" problems are being misdirected to phenomena or problems of a different character altogether. Individuals who speak of medicalization seem to have in mind a more or less normative picture of society and judge that particular types of problems can be clearly bounded, labeled unproblematically, and dealt with through delimitable institutions of control. Such individuals often follow a historical and comparative point of view and have in mind a previous era when the domain of disease-illness and medical care was more "correctly" interpreted. The idea of medicalization is not widely used by anthropologists who study medical phenomena in preliterate and literate societies. All anthropologists—especially biologically oriented ones—would agree that the concrete physical changes in the body which we see today and link to disease are ubiquitous and recurring and have been the lot of mankind throughout the period of human evolution. Moreover, all anthropologists^—especially culturally oriented ones—would support the idea that peoples of the world differ greatly in the way they define diseaseillness and go about dealing with the problems linked to this. The latter type of anthropologist would probably challenge the assumption that there is a distinct and more or less correct view of disease-illness and medical care, an assumption central to historians, sociologists, and social critics who endorse the idea of medicalization [1, 2]. In this paper the idea of medicalization is analyzed from a general anthropological point of view. The way in which medical problems are handled in preliterate societies is given principal attention, though mate-