Ebook: The quest for therapy in Lower Zaire

The holistic description of a medical system should describe the full range of practices in a society, and it should explain how these practices coexist in a changing structure of customs and social relationships. Few historians, sociologists, or other specialists have yet approximated these goals, and until now no anthropologist has attempted to describe a medical system in this manner. Herein lies the originality of The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire by John Janzen. In scale, complexity, and analytic cohesiveness it sets new standards for research in medical anthropology.

Books as rich in facts and ideas as this resist labels. It is an anthropological study, with the qualifying adjectives social, medical, humanistic, and applied. Because it describes a region of Zaire, it could also be classified among African studies books. But it will interest those who are neither anthropologists nor Africanists, for it is written so any reader, layman or specialist, who particularly wants to know how medical systems work, can understand and learn from it. It does this by inviting the reader to compare his own experience and knowledge with the facts reported here. The invitation is implicit in the concepts Janzen uses. His central concept is that of the lay therapy managing group consisting of kinsmen and friends, which is mobilized when illness strikes an individual, and which acts to define the situation and to search for a remedy. The size and composition of the group varies according to circumstances. Though Janzen is describing a region in Zaire, readers will readily see comparisons with therapy management groups that exist in other societies they know about. Because the concept includes an aspect of events that can be observed in any society, and because Janzen uses it well, his description of particular facts in Kongo society reveal general truths about whole systems of action.

Books as rich as this one resist summary. The lay therapy management group is only one of its many concepts, all of which have in common Janzen’s effort to describe the historical structure of medical pluralism. With the possible exception of a few small and very isolated societies, all medical systems in the world today are pluralistic. As the degree and organization of this pluralism varies, the central problem for a comparative study of medical systems is to develop theoretical paradigms to describe it.

In our own culture the influence of biomedical science and of doctors is such that it is essential to distinguish health systems from medical systems in order to define Janzen’s subject, and to understand that medical systems, defined objectively, include all forms of practice. This book is not about the health system in Lower Zaire. If it were, it would analyze the adaptive and dysfunctional relationships between the human population and its parasites, the patterns of nutrition, fertility, mortality, and so on. It would be an epidemiological and ecological study about the interrelationships between species as they affect the normal functions of human beings. It might use social categories, but its fundamental theories and perspective would be drawn from clinical medicine, biology, and the cultural norms of medical practitioners. Quite the contrary—this book has a different perspective and theoretical structure, for it describes a regional medical system.
[ from the foreword ]