Sources & Safety
Every claim in the atlas should trace back to a published source — and every visitor should know exactly what this site can and cannot do.
Jump to a section below, or search the bibliography by author, year, or title.
Safety & Scope
Read me firstThis atlas is
- An educational field atlas — a student senior project exploring how cultures understand illness, healing, and care.
- Built from published medical anthropology: peer-reviewed articles, academic books, and course readings, all listed below.
- A starting point for curiosity — every case links to the sources behind it so you can read further.
It is not
- Medical advice. Nothing here can diagnose a condition, recommend a treatment, or replace a clinician.
- A complete account of any culture's medicine. Each case is one documented episode, not a portrait of a whole people.
- A ranking of healing systems. The atlas compares ways of understanding — it does not score them.
The Field Guide that appears on case pages and in the AI Guide is an educational assistant with strict boundaries. Its answers are drawn from the atlas's own pages and checked against the sources on this page. Every question takes one of three paths:
Answered from atlas content — what a practice means, where it comes from, how a community understands it.
Answered with links into the concept and case pages, so every claim stays traceable.
Always receives a safety response pointing to qualified care. Never a diagnosis, treatment, or dosage — no exceptions.
This atlas describes how people understand illness — it cannot tell you what to do about one. If you are worried about your health or someone else's, please talk with a licensed clinician or visit a local clinic; in an emergency, call your local emergency number. If language or cost is a barrier, many community health centers offer interpreter services and sliding-scale fees. The barriers this atlas writes about are real — and so is the help.
Method & Respect
How this was madeChoosing sources
Cases and concepts are built from peer-reviewed journals (Annals of Internal Medicine, PLoS Medicine, Social Science & Medicine, Medical Anthropology Quarterly and others), academic monographs, and the course readings of a medical anthropology curriculum. Each case and concept page lists the specific sources used on that page.
Citation practice
Citations name the author, year, work, and journal. Where a detail — a page number, a volume — could not be verified against the source itself, it is left out rather than guessed. Quotations appear only where they could be checked.
Writing with respect
Each tradition is described in its own logic and context, without exoticizing and without ranking. Communities are internally diverse: no case speaks for everyone. Biomedicine is treated as one cultural system among others — examined with the same questions, not used as the unmarked standard.
Access & design
The atlas aims for WCAG AA contrast, avoids color as the only carrier of meaning, and keeps definitions in plain language for readers with no background in medical anthropology. Maps, icons, and illustrations are created for this project.
Bibliography
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