Phone: 415-476-3005
Fax: 415-502-5208
[email protected]
Professor Emerita, Medical Anthropology
Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine
Sharon Kaufman PhD is Professor Emerita and former Chair (2012-2018), Dept. of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. Her work explores topics at the intersection of medical knowledge and society’s expectations for health. Her research has examined the changing culture and structure of US medicine; health care delivery at the end-of-life; the relationship of biotechnologies to ethics, governance and medical practice; the shifting terrain of evidence in clinical science; practices of risk assessment; mistrust of science, and memory, consciousness and dementia.
The National Institute on Aging and the National Institute on Nursing Research at the NIH funded her research from 1983 – 2013. For 30 years she was core faculty in the joint Medical Anthropology Program UCSF/UCB and worked with medical and nursing students at UCSF. She mentors students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty from a variety of disciplines and lectures locally, nationally and internationally.
Her most recent book, Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives and Where to Draw the Line (Duke U. Press 2015) is an ethnographic story about the dilemmas twenty-first century American health care poses. Centered on the intersection of medicine and our aging society, the book is about the structure and culture of the entire biomedical health care enterprise, from research funding for treatments, to what gets funded by Medicare, to what is considered standard and necessary and why, to what, ultimately, patients and doctors talk about, agonize over and decide to do. It reveals how the structure of the system determines so much of what happens to patients, doctors and families and why it is so difficult to see the line between ‘enough’ and ‘too much’ medical intervention. By providing a map to the socio-cultural sources of our health care dilemmas, Ordinary Medicine offers a way to re-think and renew the goals of medicine, so that it can serve as a social good in the twenty-first century.
…And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life (Scribner 2005; U. Chicago Press 2006) describes the role of medical practice and hospital structure in organizing and naming life and death. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in three California hospitals, the research was motivated by the growing cultural conversation of complaint in the US about overly-technological dying and the fact that solutions to the ‘problem’ of death were being articulated almost exclusively in terms of patient decision-making and the doctor-patient relationship, rather than in terms of the structural forces of American hospital culture which emphasize aggressive treatments up to the moment of death. The book won The New Millennium Award (2007) from the Society for Medical Anthropology for most significant contribution to anthropology and to a broad audience.
Together these books won the Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology (2018) from the American Anthropological Association. They examine the present and future impacts of U.S. health care delivery on health practitioners, patients, families and the American public. They also suggest policy choices for health care reform going forward. They are part of the national dialogue paving the way for preferable futures for our medical and care delivery system.
Her two previous books are: The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life (1986 cover review, New York Times Book Review and named one of best books in 25 years of University Press publishing) and The Healer’s Tale: Transforming Medicine and Culture (1993 NEJM and JAMA reviews).
Selected recent publications:
2017 Kaufman, S. “Losing My Self”: A Poet’s Ironies and a Daughter’s Reflections on Dementia. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 60: 4: 549-568. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688645
2016 Kaufman, S. Ordinary Medicine: The Power and Confusion of Evidence. Medical Anthropology Theory, Sept. 13.http://www.medanthrotheory.org/read/6713/ordinary-medicine
2016 Kaufman, S. Invited Book Review Essay. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Work of the Dead, by Thomas Laqueur. March. https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/why-we-need-the-dead
2015 Kaufman, S. Medicare’s Next Half Century. New York Times Opinion. June 3, 2015
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/medicares-next-half-century/#more-157219
2015 Kaufman, S. As vaccination rates dip, parents walk a tightrope between doubt and risk. Health Affairs Blog, April 23, 2015
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2015/04/23/as-vaccination-rates-dip-parents-walk-a-tightrope-between-doubt-and-risk/
2014 Kaufman, S. Defining Death: Four decades of ambivalence. Huffington Post Science, January 17, 2014.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/defining-death-four-decades-of-ambivalence_b_4617991.html
2013 Kaufman, S. Fairness and the tyranny of Potential in kidney transplantation, Current Anthropology, 54: Suppl 7:S56-66.
2010 Kaufman, S. Regarding the Rise in Autism: Vaccine Safety Doubt, Conditions of Inquiry and the Shape of Freedom. Ethos 38:1:8-32. (Feb 2010 special issue: Culture and Autism).
