Linda Barnes

Wellesley High School Writer: Linda Barnes (1970)

            Linda was the student sitting on the wooden bridge in the snowy scene with Mr. Crockett that has become the emblem of “Roots and Wings,” symbolizing the deep relationship between teacher and student.  She is now a medical anthropologist and a scholar in the study of world religions.

            Dr. Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), and in the Division of Religious and Theological Studies in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching interests address the intersections of culture, religion and spirituality, and complementary and alternative therapies. She is committed to including an understanding of the healing practices of culturally complex patient populations in the training of clinicians, and to helping clinicians to better understand how religious worldviews play a part in patient and family understandings of illness and healing.

            She received her BA from Smith College, following which she earned her Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Comparative Religion and the allied field of Medical Anthropology. As an historian and medical anthropologist, her own research expertise is in the cultural and social history of Western responses to Chinese healing traditions, in relation to histories of race, medicine, and religion.

            Dr. Barnes  published her ethnographic work in leading medical anthropology journals such as Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Social, Science and Medicine.Her books include Religion and Healing in America (co-edited with Susan S. Sered, Oxford 2005); and Teaching Religion and Healing (co-edited with Ines Talamantez, Oxford 2006). Her historical scholarship appears in her book Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 (Harvard University Press, 2005). She is currently writing a book on the social history of Chinese medicine and healing traditions in the United States since 1848.