The Sociology of Health and Illness Critical Perspectives

The Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical Perspectives is an essential resource for anyone interested in health and health care. The new Ninth Edition tackles some of the most timely health issues of our day with coverage of eating disorders, the effects of inequality on health, how race, class, and gender affect health outcomes, the health politics of asthma and more. Further, new sections explore the effects of health care reform, the pharmaceutical industry, and the internet on health. Bringing together a wide range of selections from authors like Atul Gawande, Paul Farmer, and Irving Zola, The Sociology of Health and Illness continues to provide students with the most balanced and comprehensive analysis of health care today.

* = new to this edition

Part 1: The Social Production of Disease and Illness 

The Social Nature of Disease
1. Medical Measures and the Decline of Mortality, John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay

Who Gets Sick? The Unequal Social Distribution of Disease
2. Social Class, Susceptibility, and Sickness, S. Leonard Syme and Lisa F. Berkman
*3. Understanding Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health: Sociological Contribution, David R. Williams and Michelle Sternthal
*4. Sex, Gender, and Vulnerability, Rachel C. Snow
5. Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England, James Banks, Michael Marmot, Zoe Oldfield, and James P. Smith
*6. Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine, Paul E. Farmer, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee

Our Sickening Social and Physical Environments  
*7. The Health Politics of Asthma: Environmental Justice and Collective Illness Experience in the United States, Phil Brown, Brian Mayer, Stephen Zavestoski, Theo Luebke, Joshua Mandelbaum, and Sabrina McCormick
8. Social Relationships and Health, James S. House, Karl R. Landis, and Debra Umberson
9. Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation, Eric Klinenberg
*10. Greater Equality: The Hidden Way to Better Health and Higher Scores, Richard Wilkinson and Kate E. Pickett

The Social and Cultural Meanings of Illness 
*11. Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders, Abigail C. Saguy and Kjerstin Gruys
*12. Illness Meaning of AIDS Among Women with HIV: Merging Immunology
and Life Experience, Alison Scott
13. Whose Deaths Matter? Mortality, Advocacy, and Attention to Disease in the Mass Media, Elizabeth Armstrong, Dan Carpenter, and Marie E. Hojnacki

The Experience of Illness
*14. Electronic Support Groups, Patient-Consumers, and Medicalization: The Case of Contested Illness, Kristin Barker
15. The Meaning of Medications: Another Look at Compliance, Peter Conrad
16. The Remission Society, Arthur W. Frank

Part 2: The Social Organization of Medical Care

The Rise and Fall of the Dominance of Medicine
17. Professionalization, Monopoly, and the Structure of Medical Practice, Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider
18. Notes on the Decline of Midwives and the Rise of Medical Obstetricians, Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz
19. The End of the Golden Age of Doctoring, John B. McKinlay and Lisa D. Marceau
20. Countervailing Power: The Changing Character of the Medical Profession in the United States, Donald W. Light

Other Practitioners In and Out of Medicine
21. A Caring Dilemma: Womanhood and Nursing in Historical Perspective, Susan Reverby
22. From Quackery to ‘Complementary’ Medicine: The American Medical Profession Confronts Alternative Therapies, Terri A. Winnick

The Pharmaceutical Industry: The Case of Sexual Dysfunction
*23. From Lydia Pinkham to Queen Levitra: Direct-to-Consumer Advertising and Medicalization, Peter Conrad and Valerie Leiter
24. The ‘Pinking’ of Viagra Culture: Drug Industry Efforts to Create and Repackage Sex Drugs for Women, Heather Hartley

Financing Medical Care 
*25. Paying for Health Care, Thomas Bodenheimer and Kevin Grumbach
26. Doctoring as a Business: Money, Markets, and Managed Care, Deborah A. Stone
*27. The Cost Conundrum, Atul Gawande

Health Care Reform 
*28. Sociology of Health Care Reform: Building Research and Analysis to Improve Health Care, David Mechanic and Donna D. McAlpine
*29. Rationing: Theory, Politics,and Passions, Daniel Callahan
*30. Historical and Comparative Reflections on the U.S. National Health Care Insurance Reforms, Donald W. Light

Medicine in Practice  
31. The Struggle Between the Voice of Medicine and the Voice of the Lifeworld, Elliot G. Mishler
*32. Cultural Brokerage:  Creating Linkages Between Voices of the Lifeworld and Medicine Across Cross-cultural Clinical Settings, Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo
33. Social Death as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Stefan Timmermans
34. The Language of Case Presentation, Renee R. Anspach

Dilemmas of Medical Technology 
*35. MRI as Cultural Icon, Kelly Joyce 
*36. “God Help You. You’re on Dialysis.”, Robin Fields
37. A Mirage of Genes, Peter Conrad

Part 3: Contemporary Critical Debates

The Relevance of Risk
*38. Vital Signs: State-Specific Obesity Prevalence Among Adults—United States, 2009, B. Sherry, H.M. Blanck, D.A. Galuska, L. Pan, and W.H. Dietz
39. Risk as a Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health , Deborah Lupton

The Medicalization of American Society 
40. Medicine as an Institution of Social Control, Irving Kenneth Zola
41. The Shifting Engines of Medicalization, Peter Conrad

Part 4: Toward Alternatives in Health Care

Illness, Medicine, and the Internet
42. Illness and Internet Empowerment: Writing and Reading Breast Cancer in Cyberspace, Victoria Pitts
*43. Untangling the Web—Patients, Doctors and the Internet, Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman

Comparative Health Policies
44. Comparative Models ‘Health Care’ Systems, Donald W. Light
45. Health Care Reform: Lessons from Canada, Raisa Berlin Deber
*46. The British National Health Service: Continuity and Change, Jonathan Gabe

Prevention, Movements, and Social Change 
47. A Case of Refocusing Upstream: The Political Economy of Illness, John B. McKinlay
48. Politicizing Health Care, John McKnight
*49. Embodied Health Movements, Phil Brown, Stephan Zavestoski, Sabrina McCormick, Brian Mayer, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Rebecca Altman