Structure

Aims & Objectives of Core Course Teaching

  • To examine the social and cultural context of health, well being and a variety of diverse medical practices from a cross cultural perspective
  • To investigate the political, social, economic and practical dimensions of health care in clinical and non-clinical settings
  • To explore health care delivery in international environments through critical examination of NGO work and health policy
  • To consider the barriers and obstacles to health in a comparative way in to understand illness and disease experiences in the context of healing and curing especially in circumstances of cultural diversity
  • To introduce students to relevant theories and methods within anthropology, including gender, class, kinship, the body, agency, risk, subjectivity and personhood
  • To support student development of skills in critical evaluation of evidence and to encourage oral and written expressions of informed opinions about health as understood from both biomedical and nonbiomedical perspectives.

Programme Structure

2.0 units of compulsory subjects (ANTH1005A, ANTH3007, ANTH3036), and a further 2.0 units of the student’s choice. The course ANTH3036 “Anthropology for Medical Students” is exclusive to the intercalated students taking IBSc Medical Anthropology. It is designed as a ‘link course’ to the other Anthropology options and focuses on those issues of particular interest to medical students. It is assessed through a dissertation on a subject of the students’ choice. Most other courses are assessed by examination and/or essays.

Compulsory Courses

Options Courses Available in 2012/2013

Recent Dissertation Projects

  • Understanding Mental Illness in London's South Asian Muslim Community
  • Blood: Soup or Soul? A Study into the Meaning and Representations of Blood as Encountered in the Clinical Setting
  • "It Does No Harm Anyone, but It Is Harming Us". Crematoria, Cremation and a Culture Clash
  • Fetal Personhood and Mothers in Limbo: an Anthropological perspective on narratives of Miscarriage
  • Lectures, Labs and Anatomy: a Medical Student's Notion of the Body
  • Organ Transplants and the Contemporary Body-Self in a Euro-American Context: Online Communities and the Social Lives of Organs
  • The Singleton Experience in reference to China's One Child policy
  • No visible whip marks please, I have a meeting on Monday. An ethnography of a london Fetish Club
  • Women and High Heels: The Search for Power
  • Cosmetic Surgery as a Cultural Phenomenon: Race and Gender Ideologies and the Medicalisation of the South Korean Female Body
  • Papering over the cracks: A Critique of the Admissions Process at the Royal Free and University College Medical School
  • Ori: The Yoruba Conceptualisation of Destiny, Society and Religion
  • How has the medicalisation of childbirth altered Women's subjective experience of childbirth
  • Risk and Public Health Policy
  • Bangladeshi Shamanism
  • Cultural perspectives of Epilepsy
  • The Emergence of an Autistic Culture



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Header picture by UCL (acquired licence and true copy)