This edited volume brings together an impressive number of anthropologists, sociologists and historians of medicine working in the field of social and public health at various universities in Greece. It is an ambitious undertaking, one that weaves together current biomedical concerns with historical investigations of less-known episodes in the history of Greek medicine, social hygiene and public health during the early and late twentieth century. While it may not be possible to discuss in detail each chapter, an overview of the main arguments is provided.
In a well-structured introduction, the editors outline the state-of-the-art Greek research on health and society, a field that successfully combines cultural anthropology with sociology, history, social history of medicine, sociology of health and history of care and nutrition. In the subsequent chapter, Sotiria Dimitriou focuses on the interdependence between the biological and the social in defining both the human subject and technologies of health and disease. A similar emphasis on the human body dominates Giorgos Alexias’s chapter on society and medical genetics. This is a lucid analysis of the role that genetics plays in contemporary societies in determining the interlocked relationship between health and disease. Engaging further with the social and economic aspect of health, Anastasia Zissi shows how influential material difficulties are in shaping one’s mental processes of self-esteem and social identity. According to Zissi, cultural, social and economic inequalities are often at the basis of various mental disorders, depression and daily stress.
Staying within the field of mental health, Katerina Papaioannou and Manos Papaioannou use as an example the Dromokaiteion psychiatric hospital in Athens to answer some of the practical questions relating to the representation of illness and how this impacts on the socialisation and medicalisation of patients. Also revealed are the experiences of the hospital staff and how these intersect with those of the patients. Dromokaiteion, Papaioannou and Papaioannou argue, is more than an institution for mental patients: is a social and intimate space shared by both patients and their carers. A similar interest in the field of mental health and mental disorders, albeit viewed through the prism of medical anthropology, characterises Manolis Tzanakis’s chapter.
In their contribution, Giorgia Dilakis and Giorgos Alexias return to modern society’s obsession with the body. They explore the role of cosmetic and plastic surgery as a means of controlling the ageing processes of the body, underlying the dynamic relationship between physical bodies and social behaviour. This commercialisation of the body complements forms of human enhancement and anti-ageing techniques that have of late become widely accepted in Western societies. Patients as customers is a tune sung not only by the new artisans of biological aesthetics, but also by those concerned whether the rights of the individuals are respected when medical services are employed. In their chapter, Michali Koulidou, Maria Christopoulou, Evegenia Georgoussi and Haralambos Oikonomou have assessed the rights of 503 Greek patients using two public hospitals in Attica. As this empirical study intimates, one must question the assumption that the individual is merely a recipient of medical intervention and knowledge without any power of decision over his or her health and illness.
Redefining the nature of the body and its social and cultural context prompt new ways of understanding one essential function of human societies: reproduction. As discussed by Athina Salappa in her chapter, new reproduction technologies have entirely refashioned traditional perceptions of biological maternity and paternity. Within this reconfiguration of reproduction roles, one also notices a rearrangement of gender functions, as for example in the field of health care. Martina Loos sheds light on this topic through her discussion of male nurses and women physicians in various hospitals in Germany. Loos also provides a conceptual framework based on hermeneutics and phenomenology to help us understand the new gender boundaries emerging from such contexts.
The notions of gender, power and control are also central to Athina’s Peglidou’s discussion of depression and the medicalisation of pain. She argues that certain somatic symptoms are social and gendered constructions. While Peglidou is interested in mental health, Diana Riboli and Giannis Kyriakakis use their fieldwork in Malaysia and Ghana, respectively, to discuss populations outside the context of the Western tradition of medicine. In both chapters, anthropology intersects medical ecology in offering a holistic interpretation of the ways in which cultural, environmental, economic, political and sociological factors influence local understandings of health and disease.
The same empiricist methodology surfaces in Manos Savvakis and Eva Karatza’s discussion of the relationship between medical training and the practical ways of dealing with disease and death in concrete situations. Important practical and theoretical issues relating to death are also analysed by Dimitris Magriplis in his chapter, while Dimitri Iliopoulos approaches the topic from the perspective of new technologies of biological and chemical welfare developed in the wake of increased uncertainty about global terrorism, war and epidemics. Advances in genetics and medicine notwithstanding, the cultural production of health remains ambiguous in areas that retained a strong religious character, as illustrated by Christina Veikou’s chapter on popular therapeutic practices on the island of Lesbos. The enduring belief there is that placing a piece of garment worn by a sick person in a sacred place may contribute to that person’s recovery and cure.
Apart from one, all contributions in this volume deal with current biomedical and health issues. In their contribution, Despina Karakatsani and Vassiliki Theodorou discuss the development of puériculture and eugenics in Greece in the period before World War II. It is illuminating to see that current concerns with care, regulation, discipline, improvement and shaping of individual bodies are not new. The chapter’s greatest strength, moreover, is that it brings to life the writings and activities of a number of frequently neglected Greek paediatricians and eugenicists.
This volume succeeds in bringing together significant themes and developments in medicine as part of social history, political demography and cultural anthropology, which scholars in these various fields will find very useful. The fact that this edited volume is written in Greek and for a Greek audience may restrict its international reception. Be that as it may, the editors are to be commended for putting together a balanced combination of methodologies developed elsewhere and original Greek research in the history of health. It is a conceptual strategy that other medical historiographies in the region may find useful to emulate.
