Erika Brady

PhD, holds degrees in folklore from Harvard, UCLA, and Indiana University. She is currently associate professor and director of folk studies and anthropology at Western Kentucky University. A former chaplain associate at Southeast Hospital in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, she is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Family Practice and Community Medicine at University of South Alabama and is affiliated with the South Central Kentucky Area Health Education Center. Her book A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography appeared in 1999 (University Press of Mississippi).

Scholars in folklore and anthropology are more directly involved in various aspects of medicine such as medical education, clinical pastoral care, and negotiation of transcultural issues than ever before. Old models of investigation that artificially isolated "folk medicine", "complementary and alternative medicine," and "biomedicine" as mutually exclusive have proven too limited in exploring the real-life complexities of health belief systems as they observably exist and are applied by contemporary Americans. Recent research strongly suggests that individuals construct their health belief systems from diverse sources of authority, including community and ethnic tradition, education, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, the influence of popular media, and perception of the goals and means of formal medicine. This book explores the diversity of these belief systems and how they interact in competing, conflicting, and sometimes remarkably congruent ways. This book contains essays by leading scholars in the field and a comprehensive bibliography of folklore and medicine.