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This paper describes the birth (or rebirth) of Italian medical anthropology around the middle of the 1950s, and its subsequent complex development up to the present. During this fairly long process, the author played a role that was probably of some importance, that of both a direct witness and active participant. Here these developments are briefly reviewed, in an attempt to single out some of the stimuli and the most significant occasions that have happened, their theoretical and methodological reference points, the main lines of research that have been tackled along the way, as well as the ‘social demand’ and the ‘social use’ that have integrated and oriented the practice of the new discipline within the horizon of some of the more general problems of Italian society. In outlining here the profile of and the various events in Italian medical anthropology, this paper takes into account the fact that, although a medical anthropology with that name and the disciplinary set-up that are now internationally attributed to it began in Italy only in the mid-1950s, important lines of research to which we would today attach that name had been undertaken long ago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The beginnings of medical anthropology in the Netherlands have a ‘xenophile’ character in two respects. First, those who started to call themselves medical anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s were influenced and inspired not so much by anthropological colleagues, but by medical doctors working in tropical countries who had shown an interest in the role of culture during their medical work. Secondly, what was seen as medical anthropology in those early days almost always took place in ‘foreign’ countries and cultures. One can hardly overestimate the exoticist character of medical anthropology up to the 1980s. It was almost automatic for anthropologists to take an interest in medical issues occurring in another cultural setting, while overlooking the same issues at home. Medical anthropology ‘at home’ started only around 1990. At present, medical anthropology in the Netherlands is gradually overcoming its xenophile predilection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]