Psychosomatic Medicine 11:216-222 (1949)
© 1949 American Psychosomatic Society

Anthropology and Psychosomatics

¹ Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Washington University

From the anthropologic point of view psychosomatics may be considered an aspect of the study of response systems acquired by homo sapiens during domestication. In contemporary anthropology psychosomatics would fall in the field of "personality and culture," the newest subject of anthropologic investigation. In studying the somatic correlates of psychic disturbance anthropology has faced and continues to face the following difficulties: 1) Anthropologic expeditions have generally not included physicians. 2) Anthropologists have been strangers to the problems of psychosomatics. 3) In the presence of culture change it is difficult to tell what is "primitive" and what has been induced through contact between native and European culture. 4) It is difficult to obtain large samples and adequate controls. 5) It is impossible to compare specific etiologic factors cross-culturally because these factors are not constants and exist in cultural totalities that generally are radically different one from the other.

In spite of the difficulties cited, combined anthropologic, medical, and biochemical research among non-European cultures would give additional, much needed insight when carried out in large populations and where other conditions make good experimental design possible.

Study of Pilagá Indian culture reveals a number of psychically-related somatic disorders particularly in the areas of speech, hearing, and muscle function. Such study shows also that, in terms of some currently debated psychosomatic theories, the Pilagá Indians are free from certain expected disorders. This points to the importance of more precise definitions of etiologic factors, and the study of cultural totalities--as contrasted with single complexes--if medico-anthropological cooperation is to be fruitful in the field of psychosomatics.