Research Interests

Current Projects

Selected Publications

Teaching

MaryJo DelVecchio Good

Professor of Social Medicine
(Medical School)

Biographical Note

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, a comparative sociologist and medical anthropologist, is Professor of Social Medicine in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine. She also teaches in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Professor Good is a faculty affiliate of the Asia Center, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Professor Good is a member of the steering committee for the Harvard Initiative on Global Health, and is additionally a member of University standing committees for Middle Eastern Studies, Global Health, Islamic Studies, and Special Concentrations. At HMS, she is Co-Director of the NIMH Training Program in Culture and Mental Health services, which has brought post-doctoral and pre-doctoral trainees in medical and psychiatric anthropology to Harvard for over 24 years. She is a core faculty member of the International Mental Health Training Program, funded by the Fogarty International Center, which trains psychiatrists from China in mental health services research. Professor Good teaches and advises Harvard medical students as well as graduate and undergraduate students in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She chairs the University Milton Fund Committee, serves on the HMS IRB, and is a member of the HMS Joint Committee on the Status of Women.

Professor Good’s research broadly focuses on the culture and political economy of biomedicine, biotechnology and bioethics, including clinical realities and moral dilemmas encountered by physicians in the United States and globally (Indonesia, East Africa). She has published extensively on clinical narratives, particularly in oncology and medicine, as well as on the meaning of professional competence and medical errors in medical training and practice. Her current research in the United States, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, asks whether culture counts in mental health services and medical care, and examines both the professional and clinical cultures of psychiatry and medicine as they shape institutional as well as individual clinicians’ responses to the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of patient populations. Professor Good was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2002-2003.

Professor Good has been a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Gadjah Mada in Indonesia where she was also a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 1996-1997. Since that time, she has collaborated with colleagues at UGM to establish a Center for Bioethics, Humanities and Social Medicine. Current collaborative projects include a comparative study of the impact of patient death on physicians and implications for quality of care at the end of life in the United States and in Indonesia, funded by grants from the Cummings Foundation and the American-Indonesian Educational Foundation. Additionally, she collaborates on studies of doctoring in crisis by examining physicians and psychiatrists’ responses to disasters such as the Tsunami in Aceh and the earthquake in Yogyakarta.

In addition to her research on biomedicine, Professor Good has been collaborating with Professor Byron Good and the International Organization for Migration [IOM] to develop mental health services in post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh (Indonesia). They have conducted evaluations of levels of military violence and trauma suffered by civilian communities in rural Aceh [link], and are currently collaborating with IOM to provide outreach mental health care to 75 high-conflict affected villages.

In addition, Professor Good studies political subjectivity of contemporary Indonesians, including artists and physicians and has written together with her husband on the meanings of “amok” in recent Indonesian politics and daily life. Professor Good was a Peace Corp Volunteer in Turkey and subsequently carried out research on religion and politics; she also studies social change, women’s health, and population and health policies in Iran. She was a scientific advisor for HIID on studies of ORT and child survival in Indonesia and Pakistan, and has had a long interest in women’s mental and physical health. She has written in collaboration with former students and East African fellows on studies of the impact of HIV/AIDS on physician resilience and burnout in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as on comparative projects studying the ethics of medical disclosure in Japan and Thailand.

Professor Good’s comparative interests have long focused on the relationship between individuals and the state and most recently on states in crisis and political subjectivity. She is editor of a new volume, Postcolonial Disorders, (M. Good, Hyde, Pinto, B. Good), to be published in 2008 by University of California Press, and a contributor to Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Biehl, B. Good, Kleinman: 2007).

Professor Good is a former Co- Editor-in-Chief of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry: An International Journal of Comparative Cross-Cultural Research (1992-2004), serving previously as Associate Editor since 1986. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, and Ethos, among others, including the Cambridge/ Rutgers series in Medical Anthropology (Cambridge UP 1994-2004; Rutgers UP 2005), and the Bergham series in anthropology (Oxford). Professor Good was a member of the founding steering committee of the International Forum for Social Science in Health (1992-1996).

Research Interests

• Global Mental Health and Conflict Affected Societies
• Culture and the political economy of medicine and psychiatry, culture and disparities in treatment and care
• Mental Health Care and Health Policy
• Clinical narratives, realities, and moral dilemmas in medicine and psychiatry
• Gender and medicine, international women’s mental health, child health
  Political reformation in Indonesia, political subjectivity of contemporary Indonesians, “amok”
• Impact of HIV/AIDS on physician resilience and patient care in Kenya and Tanzania

Current Projects

• A study of the culture of medicine and psychiatry and disparities in treatment in the United States, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation
• A study of the impact of armed conflict and chronic trauma on the mental health and treatment needs of communities in Aceh, Indonesia
• A comparative study of the impact of patient death on physicians and implications for the quality of care at the end of life in the United States and Indonesia, funded by grants from the Cummings Foundation and the American-Indonesian Educational Foundation; doctoring in crisis, funded by Danida
• Political reformation in Indonesia, political subjectivity of contemporary Indonesians, including artists and physicians

Select Publications

Postcolonial Disorders (University of California Press 2008) (Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good).

Clinical Hermeneutics (Bologna, May 2005) (with Byron Good and Guido Giarelli).

American Medicine, The Quest for Competence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 1995).

Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) (with Paul Brodwin, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman).

The Politics of Science: Culture, Race, Ethnicity, and the Supplement to the Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 27:4 (December 2003) (with Doris Chang and Byron Good).

Experiencing Medical Power and the State. Tsantsa 7 (2002) (with Corina Salis Gross).

Women, Poverty and AIDS. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 17:4 (December 1993) (with Paul Farmer and Shirley Lindenbaum).

The State, Violence and Race in Psychiatry. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 15:2 (June 1991).

Traversing Boundaries: European and North American Perspectives on Medical and Psychiatric Anthropology. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14:2 (June 1990) (with Deborah R. Gordon and Mariella Pandolfi).

Emotion, Illness and Healing in the Middle East. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12:1 (March 1988) (with Michael M. J. Fischer and Byron Good).

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, “The Biotechnical Embrace,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 25(4):395-410 (December 2001).

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Nina M. Gadmer, Patricia Ruopp, Matthew Lakoma, Amy M. Sullivan, Ellen Redinbaugh, Robert M. Arnold, and Susan D. Block , “Narrative Nuances on Good and Bad Deaths: Internists’ Tales from High-Technology Work Places,” Social Science and Medicine 58(5):939-953 (2004).

Patricia Ruopp, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Matthew Lakoma, Nina M. Gadmer, Robert M. Arnold, and Susan D. Block, “Questioning Care at the End of the Life: Physicians’ Reflections on Errors and Mistakes,” Journal of Palliative Care 8(3):510-520 (2005).

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Cara James, Byron Good, and Anne Becker, “The Culture of Medicine and Racial, Ethnic, and Class Disparities in Health Care,” in Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, ed. Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, and Alan R. Nelson. Washington, D.C.: IOM, The National Academies Press, pp. 594-625 (2003, revised 2005).

Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, “Why Do the Masses So Easily Run Amok? Madness and Violence in Indonesian Politics.” Latitudes 5:10-19 (June 2001).

01/11/2008

Courses Offered This Academic Year

A Sampling of Courses Offered in Other Years

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Staff Contact

Laura Delano
laura_delano@hms.harvard.edu (617-432-0715)