The fully revised edition of this successful textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to medical sociology and an assessment of its significance for social theory and the social sciences. It includes a completely revised chapter on mental health and new chapters on the sociology of the body and on the relationship between health and risk in contemporary societies.
Bryan S Turner considers the ways in which different social theorists have interpreted the experience of health and disease, and the social relations and power structures involved in medical practice. He examines health as an aspect of social action and looks at the subject of health at three levels – the individual, the social and the societal. Among the perspectives analyzed are: Parsons′ view of the `sick role′ and the patient′s relation to society; Foucault′s critique of medical models of madness and sexuality; Marxist and feminist debates on the relation of health and medicine to capitalism and patriarchy; and Beck′s contribution to the sociological understanding of environmental pollution and hazard in the politics of health.
Table of Content
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
Medical Sociology
Religion and Medicine
From Sin to Sickness
PART TWO: CONCEPTS OF DISEASE AND SICKNESS
On Being Sick
Madness and Psychiatry – Colin Samson
Women′s Complaints
Patriarchy and Illness
Aging, Dying and Death
PART THREE: SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MEDICAL POWER
Professions, Knowledge and Power
Medical Bureaucracies
The Hospital, the Clinic and Modern Society
Capitalism, Class and Illness
Comparative Health Systems
The Globalization of Medical Power
PART FOUR: CONCLUSION
The Regulation of Bodies
Risk Society and the New Regime of Disease
The Expanding Field of the Sociology of the Body
About the author
Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Asian Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. Previously he was Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge from 1998-2005. His research interests include globalization and religion, concentrating on such issues as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronic information, religious, consumerism and youth cultures, human rights and religion, the human body, medical change, and religious cosmologies. He is Joint Chief Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals.
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