Medical Power and Social Knowledge

Bryan S Turner

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781446232729
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Index

Abercrombie, N., 137

abnormal illness behaviours, 40–2

accountancy, 136

accumulation, 179, 180

acedia, 21

activism, 124, 208

activity theory, 117, 128

acupuncture, 85

affect management, 46

African Americans, alleged mental illness among, 61–2, 82

Agassiz, Louis, 62

aging, 45, 110, 118–26, 215, 233

dying and, 125–6

theories of, 115–18

agoraphobia, 104, 105–6

AIDS, 9, 15, 196, 202, 218, 219, 227

alcoholism, 108

allocative intervention, 170

alternative medicine, 166, 213

Althusser, L., 232

American Journal of Nursing, 144

American Medical Association, 184, 185

American Psychiatric Association, 79

anatomy, 27–33, 230

anorexia nervosa, 11, 104, 106–7

anti-psychiatry, 77–9

Aquinas, St Thomas, 26

Ariès, P. 126

Armstrong, David, 233

Arrow, K.J., 194

asceticism, 19–20, 100, 107

Asclepius, 27

asylums, 57, 58, 73–4, 157, 158–9

deinstitutionalization and, 64, 66, 69

numbers in, 59–60

Australia

elderly in, 110, 111, 116, 117

hospitals in, 155

medical profession and heal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• I Introduction
• II Concepts of Disease and Sickness
• III Social Organization of Medical Power
• IV Conclusion
• References
• Index