Review special : Origins of misery

What relevance can health and disease in China possibly have for Western
devotees of Casualty or ER? The answer, Arthur Kleinman suggests, may lie in
“sociosomatics”: exploring the experience of suffering linked to inequality,
poverty and social upheaval. A physician turned social anthropologist, Kleinman
has come to view suffering as an interpersonal or intersubjective
experience—a quintessentially social matter. In his thoughtful treatise
Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine (University
of California Press, £32/$40, ISBN 0 520 20099 3), he rejects
conventional clinical or scientific approaches to human misery as dangerously
one-sided.