The Sociology of Health and Illness

Front Cover
Peter Conrad
Macmillan, 2009 - Social Science - 625 pages
First published in 1981, The Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical Perspectives has become an essential resource for anyone interested in health and health care.Fully updated, the eighth edition includes an all new section on the uninsured as well as 10 new readings examining topics such as the failures of health care reform, new trends in medicalization, the growing power of the drug industry and the determinants of media attention to disease. Provocative and wide-ranging, The Sociology of Health and Illness continues to provide students with an integrated analysis of the most important issues regarding health care today.

 

Contents

PART
5
Who Gets Sick? The Unequal Social Distribution of Disease
20
Causes and Variation in Different
38
Our Sickening Social and Physical Environments
67
Social Relationships and Health
78
The Social Production of Urban Isolation
87
Relative or Absolute Material Standards?
102
The Social and Cultural Meanings of Illness
108
The Vulnerability of Youth and the
347
Medicine in Practice
356
Social Death as a SelfFulfilling Prophecy
370
The Language of Case Presentation
386
Dilemmas of Medical Technology
415
PART 3
449
The Medicalization of American Society
468
Rationing Medical Care
493

The Experience of Illness
153
The Remission Society
186
The End of the Golden Age of Doctoring
213
Other Practitioners In and Out of Medicine
249
The American Medical
261
Medical Industries
278
Financing Medical Care
297
Paying for Health Care
321
Money Markets and Managed Care
329
The Uninsured
337
The Trouble with Rationing
499
Politicizing Health Care
507
Comparative Health Polices
534
Lessons from Canada
553
Continuity and Change
560
Prevention Movements and Social Change
575
New Approaches to Social Movements
592
Credits
605
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

Peter Conrad is the Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences and Chair of the Health: Science, Society and Policy program at Brandeis University. He earned his doctorate from Boston University. The author of numerous books and journal articles on the sociology of health and illness, Dr. Conrad received the Leo G. Reeder Award from the American Sociological Association in 2004 for his distinguished contributions to medical sociology. His works include the award-winning Deviance and Medicalization (written with J.W. Schneider), the co-edited Handbook of Medical Sociology, Fifth Edition, and his newest book, The Medicalization of Society, published in 2007.

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