Margaret Lock FRSC (born 1936) is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.
After a trip to Japan, Lock made a career switch and commenced her training in anthropology at Berkeley, culminating in 1976 in a Doctor of Philosophy in cultural anthropology.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock reported a case where, after hearing the story of a woman under tremendous personal stress, medical students a. advised her to adhere to the prescription regimen. b. questioned the veracity of the doctor's diagnosis.
She is currently the Marjorie Bronfman Professor Emerita in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University and is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at McGill. Lock is the author or co-editor of 17 books and over 200 scholarly articles.
Among the women, residents of Denmark, Sweden and Norway were most likely to report that going through menopause turned out better than they expected, while participants living in the U.S., U.K., France and Canada were more prone to find menopause much worse than they had anticipated.
In Japan, menopause is looked upon as a natural life-stage, and the very word for menopause, konenki, means renewal, season and energy. In India, menopause is also approached as a natural stage of life that comes with many benefits.
At the core of medical anthropology's exploration is the concept of our three 'bodies': (1) our physical body, i.e. the body of lived experiences; (2) our social body, i.e. how culture symbolizes and represents our personhood; and finally (3) our body politic, i.e. how our bodies are regulated, surveilled, and ...
More generally, local biologies refers to the way in which the embodied experience of physical sensations, including those of well-being, health, and illness, is in part informed by the material body, itself contingent on evolutionary, environmental, social and individual variables.
A French physician coined the term menopause in 1821. Medical interest in menopause increased considerably in mid 19th century. In 1930s people started describing it as a deficiency disease.
The average age of menopause in Japan is 50.0±0.1 years [3].
This generally accepted definition states that “health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (11).
Which of the following describes how anthropologists describe the primary way humans adapt to and manipulate their physical and social environments, in light of the human evolutionary past? Cultural adaptation has mostly replaced genetic adaptation.
The WHO constitution states: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." An important implication of this definition is that mental health is more than just the absence of mental disorders or disabilities.
On the basis of such an approach, I reached the conclusion in the early 1990s that part of our task is to recognize “local biologies,” that is, biological difference among people that results from bodily responses to differing environments over time and across space.