This is a study of the response to illness of the Huli people of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. There are many accounts of traditional responses to illness in societies such as the Huli. Some information is available on levels of disease. There are also some quantitative data on the utilisation of Western health services. But there have been few attempts to bring together these aspects of the modern experience of illness in such societies and to examine their interrelationships. This broad aim guided the design of this research.

A long-standing wish to become an anthropologist became a firm plan when I worked as a medical officer in Papua New Guinea from 1972 to 1974. The view from a clinic offers little opportunity to understand what leads people to seek treatments of different sorts. The anthropological approach allows a unique opportunity for examining the context and meaning of such decisions. However, despite this potential, the particular theoretical concerns of the subject have produced only a partial picture of societies such as the Huli in the literature of medical anthropology.

It is often difficult to relate anthropological studies of illness to the common problems that concern all people in their everyday lives. When I first worked in Papua New Guinea as a medical officer I was struck by the gulf between the accounts of illness in the anthropological literature and the people's responses to illness as I observed these in my clinical practice.