David J. Hufford
Department of Humanities
Penn State College of Medicine
(Hershey Medical Center)
David J. Hufford is Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine (Hershey Medical Center), with joint appointments in Behavioral Science and Family &;Community Medicine. He also is Director of the Doctors Kienle Center
for Humanistic Medicine at the Hershey Medical Center, an endowed center devoted to improving doctor-patient communication. He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He had this to say about his essay, Cultura
l Diversity, Alternative Medicine & Folk Medicine
The following essay was first published in Perspectives from the Humanities, a bi-monthly, in-house publication of the Humanities Department at the Penn State College of Medicine. These Perspectives pieces are distributed to all faculty, stu
dents and residents in the College. Subsequently I published a modified version in my ethics column in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. This essay, and the two locations where it appeared, provide a small illustration of s
ome of the possibilities of "folklore studies applied to health," as I called my applied work in my dissertation (U. Pa. 1974). From current efforts to provide culturally competent health care to the explosion of professional and popular interest in alter
native medicine, folklorists have the opportunity to both contribute and benefit (in practical and theoretical terms). It is a great pleasure, after more than 20 years doing this work, to find some folklorists now joining the project, Bonnie O'Connor and
Anne Scott being two prime examples. But the amount of work (and nyumber of opportunities) is enoromous--and the competition is increasingly fierce, as these topics explode in prominence. I hope that this new avenue for electronic discussion will help to
increase the number of folklkorists who choose to do work in this area.
Bibliography
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive
:: Issue 1 July 1997
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