ABSTRACT
I share with many of my professional confreres the conviction that between medicine and anthropology there exists a native and profound affinity. Each is avowedly “a science of man,” yet they do differ in certain respects. Anthropology is the more embracive discipline, concerned as it is with man’s being, over the span of as-yet-undetermined hundreds of thousands of years. Medicine, in contrast, is bound to the contemporary scene. Medicine is a science of man subserving the functions of service—those of preventing and treating disease and also of safeguarding health. The conjunction between medicine and anthropology is effected by the need to know man as a historically evolving creature, unique in that, in addition to his somatic and physiological evolution, man has also acquired and developed culture.
