Dava, Daktar, and Dua: anthropology of practiced medicine in India.

The paper explicates "practiced medicine" as an operative cross-cultural analytic concept by locating it within previous major developments and directions of study within anthropological studies of medicine in India, and medical anthropology more generally. Practiced medicine in India, for example, allows us to see better how India manages not only multiple traditional and modern medical approaches, languages, therapeutic regimens, and materia medica, but it also leads us to a sustained moral, social and material criticism from within. The study of such diversity leads to a loosely shared, and ethnographically attestable, cultural reasoning, practice and practical ethos across the traditional and modern medical worlds. Also appearing before us are the usually hidden cultural assumptions, negotiations and compromises of diverse Indian medical practitioners, and the strengths and weaknesses of modern medicine under "normal" and "disastrous" situations in contemporary India. As India today grapples with issues of availability, affordability, equity, and distributive justice in medical care, its practiced medicine raises issues of "critical consciousness" for modern (and traditional), state supported medicine.

The structure of oriented sphingomyelin bilayers.

X-ray diffraction from oriented bilayers of sphingomyelin gave up to 14 orders of diffraction of a lamellar repeat of 68.5 A on the merididan and up to eight reflections, including a strong reflection at 4.2 A, on the equator. The diffraction spacings did not change when the sphingomyelin bilayers were exposed to different humidities. A direct analysis of the low resolution X-ray data, using deconvolution is presented. A comparison of the Patterson functions of sphingomyelin with those of phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine suggests that the molecular structure of sphingomyelin in oriented bilayers resembles the structure of both phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine. Molecular model calculations for sphingomyelin bilayers have also been performed. Electron density profiles of sphingomyelin bilayers at resolution of about 6 A and about 2.5 A are presented. Our results indicate that the phosphorylcholine head group of sphingomyelin is in the plane of the membrane and at right angles to the hydrocarbon chains, the hydrocarbon chains are nearly parallel to each other, and there is only a limited, if any, interdigitation of the hydrocarbon chains of the adjacent sphingomyelin molecules in the bilayer.