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Patients and Healers
Arthur Kleinman / 1981
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Physician-anthopologist and Siamit faculty Arthur Kleinman presents a framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture.
Rationalizing Epidemics
David Jones / 2004
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Historian David Jones examines how European settlers explained and rationalized the epidemics that decimated Native populations during colonization. Century after century, they tried to understand the causes of epidemics, the vulnerability of American Indians, and the persistence of health disparities.
Read Rationalizing Epidemics.
A Fortunate Man
John Berger and Jean Mohr / 1967
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In the impoverished rural community in which he works, John Sassall tends the maimed, the dying, and the lonely. He is not only the dispenser of cures but the repository of memories. As John Berger and Jean Mohr follow Sassall about his rounds, they produce a book whose careful detail broadens into a meditation on the value we assign a human life.
Read A Fortunate Man
Life Beside Itself
Lisa Stevenson / 2014
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Anthropologist Lisa Stevenson examines two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present).
Read Life Beside Itself
A Mess to be Reckoned With
This American Life / 2020
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Lissa Yellow Bird searches for missing people. Cold cases, mostly. People no one else is looking for. It’s not her job, but a lot of Native Americans go missing and their cases remain unsolved, so families often ask Lissa for help.
Listen to This American Life
Fifty Miles From Tomorrow
William Hensley / 2008
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William Hensley was raised to live the seminomadic life that his Iñupiaq ancestors had lived for thousands of years. In this stirring memoir, he offers us a rare firsthand account of growing up Native Alaskan, and later, in the lower forty-eight, as a fearless advocate for Native land rights.
Hotıì ts'eeda Ełèts’ehdèe
Donna May Kimmaliardjuk / 2019
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Inuk cardiac surgeon Donna May Kimmaliardjuk speaks to settler colonialism and the future of Inuit health through a doctor’s sort of analogy: parasitism and the immune response.
Watch at Hotıì ts'eeda Ełèts’ehdèe
Trail of Tears
This American Life / 1998
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Sarah Vowell and her sister re-trace the route their Cherokee ancestors took when expelled from their own land. They reflect on their own American-ness and Cherokee-ness, and on the more difficult question: What's history good for, anyway?
Listen to This American Life
Scenes From a Transplant
This American Life / 1998
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After years of covering stories about medicine, NPR reporter Rebecca Perl enters the hospital as a patient. She moves from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones. What she sees and what she learns.
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Bedside Diplomacy
This American Life / 2000
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In the hospital, we give up our normal schedule and sleep patterns; we give up our normal food and clothing; we're in a place that has its own rules and its own language and its own customs. Stories about those delicate and sometimes not-so-delicate negotiations.
Listen to This American Life.