When studying medicine from an anthropological perspective, there are several themes that are repeatedly encountered. These include the body and its representation, meaning and a person's response to that meaning, and finally the symbolic images that construct and shape both meaning and bodily representation. Each of these themes is addressed throughout medical anthropology texts and they are linked and build on each other in various ways. The body is the place of medicine, because the body is the place of all cultural practices. As Byron Good states, “medicine formulates the human body and disease in a culturally distinctive way.” (Good, 65) It is the cultural fashion of Western medicine to objectify the body by constructing it in purely biochemical and molecular terms. As Shiehisa Kuriyama shows us in his work, this is the result of the historical development of Greek medicine and its intersection with Western scientific sentiment. Kuriyama says that “conceptions of the body owe as much to particular uses of the senses as to particular 'ways of thinking'” (Kuriyama, 12). He goes on to explain how a tradition of empiricism and a belief that “only [literal speech] can ensure clear understanding; [figurative language] is profoundly unreliable” (Kuriyama, 75), informed the development of Western medical culture. With the obsession with clear, unambiguous language came a set of assumptions that, among other things, created a hierarchy of bodily representation. Kuriyama describes this in terms of Western obsessions with musculature or the Chinese emphasis on the appearance of skin. When the West embarked on its various imperialist projects around the world, this hierarchy of… medium of paper… lacked modernity. The villagers were acutely aware of what the shaman meant not only to their culture, but also to those in the transnational space, and their conception changed because of this. We thus see how medical anthropology studies and provides analysis on the topics of the body, body perception and representation of the body, as well as meaning and symbolism. We also see how medical anthropology takes these interpretations and uses them to critique the practices of the system. The biomedical system largely ignores the social aspects of illness, and this does a disservice to the suffering individual it seeks to heal. It emphasizes a biological reductionism that limits the care it can offer to the person it reconstructs as a patient and, in doing so, belittles the multiple meanings that medical symbols can have for the patient..