How do we understand health in relation to society? What role does culture play in shaping our experiences of, and orientation to, health and illness? How do we understand medicine and medical treatment within a sociological framework?
| Publisher | Sage Publications |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9780857024770 |
| Year | 2013 |
| Pages | 229 |
The first edition of Key Concepts in Medical Sociology, published in 2004, was a huge success. The text proved popular among students of sociology and cognate subjects, as well as those undertaking professional training in health-related disciplines. For instance, students of medicine and nursing are increasingly being exposed to sociological insights into the relationships between social structures and health inequalities, stigma, the social aspects of bodies or embodiment, death and chronic illness. Hence, as with our own teaching of under- and postgraduate students in the social sciences and future clinicians, we have found it useful to include the first edition of this text as a key reference on our class reading lists.
Nine years have passed since that first edition was published, and, as might be anticipated amidst broader social transformations, the domains of health and illness continue to represent rapidly moving objects for and subjects of sociological analysis. Health issues demand ongoing consideration amidst increasing complexity and controversy, or at least people’s growing awareness that health, illness and care cannot be taken for granted. McDonnell et al. (2009), for example, flag such concerns in relation to the internet and heightened sensitivity to medical risk (iatrogenesis), citing controversies surrounding the putative safety of vaccinations for children.
We could, of course, add to this, drawing from health inequalities literature which elucidates the impact of neoliberal globalization as Western capitalism lurches from one crisis to the next. At the current historical juncture, we certainly remain mindful of the pressing salience of sociology in understanding class divisions (in interaction with gender and ethnicity, for instance) and their relation to (growing) health inequalities in the UK and beyond. When considering people’s private troubles, especially in health contexts, attention cannot veer too far from larger social structures and what C. Wright Mills (1959) termed public issues.
Part 1 focuses on the social patterning of health and includes entries on health inequalities and the social causation of (ill) health. Entries set out the ways in which social divisions, such as social class, are associated with various measures of health status, and discuss the ways in which such concepts have been operationalized. The study of inequalities in relation to occupational social class has been particularly prominent in the UK, for instance. However, as the other entries in this section show, the distribution of life chances and health within and between nations are also structured by age, gender, ethnicity, place of residence and neoliberal globalization. Furthermore, these entries illustrate how research deploying these concepts has developed through collaborating with other disciplines, such as epidemiology.
At the same time, understanding how this social patterning of health comes about requires moving beyond statistical correlations. Hence, entries in Part 1 include conceptual approaches that have been used to study the causes of health inequalities. One of the striking aspects of this section is how clearly the different approaches can be related to classic sociological debates. The relative role in health causation of ideas and values compared to material factors in shaping social change and individual behaviour, and the significance of social integration for health, are concerns that would be recognizable to sociology’s founding European triumvirate: namely Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim.
The themes taken up in Part 2 derive more directly from North American traditions of sociology, in the form of functionalism and symbolic interactionism, with the conception of illness as a form of deviance linking the two. Sociological studies of the experience and meanings of illness and people’s interactions with health professionals have, indubitably, generated concepts that have had a profound impact on both sociology as a discipline and the delivery of care. Arguably, the concepts of stigma, chronic illness and quality of life have become so taken-for-granted in discussions of health care that their origins in particular concerns and the ways in which their use may have changed can be overlooked.
Few sociology students go back, for example, to Parsons’ (1951) original formulation of the sick role and, as a result, often fail to appreciate fully either the context in which Parsons wrote or that this concept was a depiction of normative expectations and not actual behaviours. Other contributions to this section cover concepts that have risen to prominence more recently, such as illness narratives, embodiment, risk and emotions. In developing and using these concepts, medical sociology has sought to move beyond one-dimensional accounts of illness as deviance to link up with more general concerns with self-identity and cultural meaning that characterize late modern societies. The experience of illness can therefore be seen to reflect and contribute to the shaping of contemporary cultures. The emphasis on personal narratives has expressed this central motif, both for sociology and the wider society.
| Title | Key Concepts in Medical Sociology |
|---|---|
| Author | Jonathan Gabe & Lee F. Monaghan |
| Publisher | Sage Publications |
| Year | 2013 |
| Pages | 229 |
| Country | London |
| ISBN | 9780857024770 |
| Format | |
| URL | Jonathan Gabe & Lee F. Monaghan Key Concepts in Medical Sociology PDF |