ABSTRACT
The anthropologists Lucian and Jane Hanks happened to be doing research in the Thai rural community of Bang Chan when an outbreak of diphtheria occurred in 1953. The book Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines by Richard W. Lieban is a particularly useful example of field research in health-related ethnography in the middle of the twentieth century. The medical anthropology and nutritional anthropology sub-disciplines have both contributed to the development of various mixtures of research methodologies, including mixing of quantitative and qualitative data procedures. A collection of papers edited by David Landy gave a particularly vivid picture of the heterogeneity inherent in the domains that he titled Culture, Disease, and Healing: Studies in Medical Anthropology. Alexander Alland's argument for widespread theoretical focus on concepts of adaptation, and the need to combine biological and cultural data in a unified ecological framework, argues for inter-relating qualitative data gathering with quantitative research tools.
