An Index of Symptom and Disease in Zulu Culture

A major area on which the interests of physicians and scientists converge can be described broadly in a single question: what are the relationships between health and illness, human behavior, and culture? Attempts to explore this and related questions are represented by the increasing volume of studies in which a a disease or health condition is one of the major variables to be examined along various or behavioral axes and by studies of the etiology or distribution of specific diseases which examine social phenomena as independent variables. Additionally, descriptive studies of the social distribution of disease, under such labels as social medicine, social epidemiology, human ecology, or geographical pathology, are covering a wider range of diseases and locales.