Arthur KleinmanEdit

Arthur Kleinman (born 1936) is an American psychiatrist and medical anthropologist whose career has helped shape how medicine understands illness across cultures. By marrying clinical insight with anthropological analysis, he showed that patients’ explanations for illness, the social contexts in which care is sought, and the meanings attached to suffering are not peripheral to treatment but central to it. He has spent decades attached to leading U.S. universities and research centers, and his work has influenced medical education, clinical practice, and global health policy.

His best-known works—The Illness Narratives (1988) and Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980, co-authored with Byron Good)—popularized core concepts that reshape how clinicians think about illness. In these books he introduced the idea that there are multiple, culturally shaped explanations for illness and that the biomedical model is only one lens among many. The framework Kleinman helped develop centers on the triad of disease, illness, and sickness, and on the notion of Explanatory models: the diverse beliefs people bring to the causes, pathways, and treatments of their symptoms. This approach has guided medicine toward Cultural competence and patient-centered care while maintaining a commitment to scientific methods and effective treatments.