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REVIEW: Sick Societies, by Robert B. Edgerton

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Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, Robert B.

Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, Robert B. Edgerton (Free Press, 1992). I just had a baby, which means I have once again been immersed in a sea of advice about how “traditional cultures” do things. And miraculously, every single kid, I discover some new practice I’ve never heard of but that apparently just everyone did until about five minutes ago. This time it was vaginal steaming. (Don’t Google, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.) Which cultures, exactly? Oh, you know…the traditional ones, the ones whose folk wisdom is untrammeled by Western medicalization,…

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