About this Atlas
A senior-project field notebook about how culture shapes the way people get sick, get care, and get better.
Dear reader,
I'm Hui, and this atlas is my senior project. It grew out of a semester of reading medical anthropology — Kleinman's explanatory models, Fadiman's account of Lia Lee, Moerman on the meaning response — and noticing the same thing in every text: the question "what is good care?" never has just one answer. A treatment that looks obvious in one clinic can look dangerous, rude, or beside the point in another home.
I wanted to build something that lets you feel that, not just read it: spin a globe, land on a real case, and see illness through someone else's explanatory model for a few minutes. The field-notebook look is deliberate — these pages are notes from other people's worlds, written by a student who is still learning, not a textbook handing down verdicts.
Here is what I've packed into the atlas, and who I imagined opening it —
Encl. No 1 — What's inside
- 17 case studies from real medical-anthropology research, pinned on a globe
- 10 core concepts that connect the cases
- A comparison lab, an AI cultural guide, and a printable daily bookmark
Encl. No 2 — Who it's for
- Students meeting medical anthropology for the first time
- Future clinicians and caregivers who will work across cultures
- Anyone curious why "just see a doctor" isn't simple everywhere
One thing it is not: medical advice, or a complete picture of any culture. The full scope, limits, and bibliography live on the Sources & Safety page.
This project leans on the work of the scholars in the bibliography. I have only read and retold what they published — I haven't done fieldwork of my own, and I don't speak for them, or for the patients, families, and communities whose experiences their research records. All I can do is thank them and point you to the sources. Thanks also to my instructor and classmates for feedback along the way.
About the AI guideThe AI Cultural Guide is designed to connect to a live language-model API; that connection is still in progress, so for now it runs on curated responses written for this project. Either way it answers cultural and comparative questions from the atlas's own pages, and deliberately refuses to give medical advice.
About how it was builtThis atlas was built through prompt engineering. My role was the design: the concept, structure, visual direction, and the boundaries each page had to stay within. The code and the written content were generated by AI tools working inside that frame. Every case, concept, and citation still traces back to a published source — citation practice is documented under Method & Respect.
About the artworkThe illustrations are AI-generated line drawings, prompt-crafted to match the field-notebook style of the atlas. No stock icons; a field notebook deserves better.
If a fact, citation, or cultural description here is wrong or worded poorly, I want to fix it — this atlas is a student work in progress, and corrections are welcome.
