ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between biomedicine and anthropology in its historic and political contexts, and focuses on the many points of contact between the two fields that culminated in the appearance of medical anthropology as a distinct subfield of the larger discipline. This history reveals the extent to which biomedicine has shaped and often constrained anthropological thinking about health. The chapter provides a critical framework for examining the significant periods of interaction between biomedicine and medical anthropology. It offers a historic examination of the evolution of anthropological interest in health and the roles played by biomedicine and its practitioners in guiding this interest. The dawn of agrarian states produced a far reaching transformation in society/environment relations. With the consolidation of the role of anthropologists in international public health and in biomedical institutions, the sense emerged that a new subfield of anthropology had come into being.
