Volume 9 • 2022 • Issue 1

Q What is medical anthropology and why is it relevant to dentistry? Dr. Mary Ellen Macdonald (MEM) : Anthropologists study culture. Medical anthropologists are interested in health cultures, which includes studying how people understand and experience being healthy or being sick. It also includes the cultures of formal and informal health care systems. Through a medical anthropological lens, we can think about individuals as members of systems or institutions; this includes patients, family members, health professionals, health administrators, and policy-makers. What the field covers is vast. My current focus is on oral health, but my career has also included other domains of health and sickness, especially palliative care. My current research program focuses on the health of “vulnerabilized” populations in Canada—I use this word instead of vulnerable because the process by which people are made vulnerable is important to emphasize—looking across three main domains: oral health, health professions education, and end-of-life care. There’s lots of social science research in medicine, yet little in oral health. It’s a relatively new area of exploration for anthropologists, which is exciting! It’s so important to contextualize how we think about our mouths, how the mouth fits within the body, all of the esthetics of the mouth and how people live different values about, and cultural versions of, the mouth. Grief Literacy in Dentistry Q&A with Dr. Mary Ellen Macdonald Dr. Macdonald is a medical anthropologist with doctoral training in Indigenous health and postdoctoral training in palliative care. She is an associate professor in the faculty of dentistry, an associate member of the Institute of Health Sciences Education, chair of the McGill Qualitative Health Research Group, and program head of Pediatric Palliative Care Research at the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal. 26 | 2022 | Issue 1