Earliest phases in the evolution of sickness and healing.

Sickness and healing constitute the root concepts that center medical anthropological inquiry and give the field its identity. Here, they are held to manifest a biological adaptation designed by evolution that requires culture for its final realization. Sickness and healing thus provide anthropology with a biocultural form that has changed in content and expression during cultural evolution. The early phases of this evolution, those bearing the most apparent influences of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, are reviewed and analyzed in the article. Some of the implications of this for medical anthropology are discussed.