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Biology’s recession within the subdiscipline irked SMA’s physically/biologically oriented members. Indeed, in his 1975 “What is Medical Anthropology?” commentary Khawaja Hasan – among the first to use the phrase “medical anthropology” in print – took the emerging subfield generally and George Foster specifically to task for neglecting the physical/biological side of the anthropological equation. Foster made this omission in a 1974 commentary contrasting medical anthropology and sociology. Hasan argued that, rather than focusing on the culture–society distinction, which Foster did (not uniquely: see, for example, Dingwall 1980; Paul 1963), Foster should have focused on anthropology’s holistic approach to “man” (sic). “Man” is the major focus of medicine, too, wrote Hasan; this, he argued, gives anthropology and medicine much more in common than anthropology and sociology. Hasan provided example after example of the role that biologists and “medical men” played in anthropology’s development, followed by more examples of physical/biological anthropologists at work within medicine.

It probably did not hurt Hasan’s case that physical anthropology had by this time become more biologically oriented, not only in terms of data favored but also in terms of questions asked. In any event, Foster was responsive: In revising the offending 1974 commentary for use in the first medical anthropology textbook, published in 1978 (twenty-plus years after Benjamin Paul edited the first casebook (1955)), Foster and his co-author Barbara Anderson took a more biologically informed position, even including a reference to Hasan.

Others, too, provided correctives. Take, for example, Medical Anthropology, which Gretel and Pertti (Bert) Pelto founded in 1977 (SMA was still at that time struggling to some degree with the generalist–specialist question and so only wanted a newsletter). The Peltos were committed to including a biological perspective, as reflected not only in the journal’s content but also in its editorial board (Gretel Pelto, Personal communication, December 18, 2008, and January 13, 2009). Also, a key teaching text first published in 1978 specifically highlighted biological and ecological perspectives (McElroy and Townsend 2004); and a 1980 textbook that took a biocultural approach proclaimed in its subtitle to be “expanding views of medical anthropology” (Moore et al. 1980).

Yet, despite these correctives, science itself had by the 1980s come under scrutiny. The scientific method – the paradigm that biological anthropologists most often worked within – was increasingly seen as an “establishment” tool. Worse, evolutionary biology was maligned by some because of its potential use by racists (D’Andrade 2000, p. 223).

Finding itself on the “wrong” side of the culture–biology divide thrown up and vilified by vocal and morally accusatory opponents of positivism, biological anthropology received less than its fair share of recognition. This is not to say that biological medical anthropology did not take place; indeed it did, and continues to do, in ways that have contributed greatly to advancing our biocultural understanding regarding, for example, high-altitude adaptations, lactose tolerance, breastfeeding, stress, substance use, and global disease threats as well as to building a more theory-driven epidemiology and a culturally informed epigenetics. However, such efforts were (and are) often rewarded more richly outside of medical anthropology than in it.