Byron J. Good, Ph.D., is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Interim Chairman in the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Good's book, Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. He was a co-editor of World Mental Health: Problems, Priorities and Responses (1995), of Pain as Human Experience (1992), and of Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder (1985). He has been on the Editors-in-Chief of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry: An international journal of comparative cross-cultural research since 1987.

Prof. Good has a special interest in how culture influences the meaning and experience of illness and suffering. Medicine, Rationality and Experience outlines a theoretical perspective for cross-cultural studies of illness, based in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and narrative studies. The book argues that physicians and healers, as well as those who are ill, enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. It explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering. And it argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing. In particular, it argues that all medicine joins 'soteriological' and physiological dimensions, bringing together ultimate concerns and the desire for salvation with the lived experience of the body.

Prof. Good has conducted research in Middle Eastern societies (in Iran and Turkey), in various settings in the United States, and most recently in the community of Yogyakarta in central Java in Indonesia. His work has focused primarily on social and cultural dimensions of major mental illness -- with a specialized interest in depression and affective disorders and more recently in psychotic disorders. His most recent work examines the experience and response to psychotic illness -- or madness -- in Java. On the one hand, he is pursuing research on the onset of psychotic illnesses (with special focus on a subclass of psychoses with very rapid, acute onset), social and cultural responses to such illnesses, treatment (in both popular and medical settings), and factors that influence course and outcome of psychoses in Java. On the other hand, he is examining more broadly how the language of madness is present in Indonesian public discourses, particularly reflections on violence in Indonesian society.

Prof. Good's theoretical concerns focus on notions of subjectivity, and how quite diverse theoretical approaches -- interpretive and phenomenological traditions, narrative analysis, and diverse forms of critical theory and post-structuralism -- may all contribute to an understanding of changing conditions for subjectivity in contemporary societies. His interest in illness experience and suffering are framed by these larger theoretical concerns.