Applied+Medical+Anthropology+-+Roots

=Applied Medical Anthropology - Roots=

Development and trajectories
In the 1960s and 1970s, many medical anthropologists (or would-be medical anthropologists) worked with community health centers, collaborating with communities for the betterment of health broadly defined. Core commitments of these centers included research on and with local communities, training of local health aids and research partners, and health advocacy teams that fought to improve housing conditions and access to resources, among a host of other structural changes to improve health and wellbeing. Many of these centers found financial support from the Office of Economic Opportunity, as part of The Great Society's War on Poverty (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Economic_Opportunity). These centers themselves can be understood as part of a growing move in public health and various social sciences to try to understand the social determinants of health - leading to the founding of Social Medicine and Social Epidemiology, as well as partnerships with developing work in Health Education. Key to the development of these ideas were the South Africans Sidney and Emily Kark, along with many of their collaborators, particularly a group of scholar activist researchers in North Carolina. See Links Below.

Key figures
Sidney and Emily Kark John Cassel

Guy Steuart

Bibliographies
[|Sidney L. Kark] , Guy W. Steuart, A Practice of Social Medicine: A South African Team's Experiences in Different African Communities. 1962

Steckler, A.B., Dawson, L., Israel, B.A. & Eng, E. (1993). Community health development: An overview of the works of Guy W Steuart. Health Education Quarterly, Supp 1, S3-S20

South African Model: []

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: [] [|Health Education and Health Behavior] [|Overcoming disparities]

Harvard Department of Social Medicine: []