You are here

The Sociology of Health and Illness
Share

The Sociology of Health and Illness
Critical Perspectives

11th Edition
Edited by:


July 2023 | 864 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc
This anthology for Medical Sociology courses, is edited by two leading experts in the field. It brings together readings from the scholarly literature on health, medicine, and health care, covering some of the most timely health issues of our day, including eating disorders, the effects of inequality on health, how race, class, and gender affect health outcomes, the health politics of asthma, the effects of health care reform, the pharmaceutical industry, health information on the Internet, and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Part I The Social Production of Disease and Meanings of Illness
The Social Nature of Disease

 
John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay
Reading 1 Medical Measures and the Decline of Mortality
Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, and Parisa Tehranifar
Reading 2 Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities: Theory, Evidence, and Practice
Who Gets Sick? The Unequal Social Distribution of Disease

 
S. Leonard Syme and Lisa F. Berkman
Reading 3 Social Class, Susceptibility, and Sickness
David R. Williams and Selina A. Mohammed
Reading 4 Racism and Health: Pathways and Scientific Evidence
Rachel C. Snow
Reading 5 Sex, Gender, and Vulnerability
Jason Beckfield, Sigrun Olafsdottir, and Elyas Bakhtiari
Reading 6 Health Inequalities in Global Context
John B. McKinlay
Reading 7 A Case for Refocusing Upstream: The Political Economy of Illness
Our Sickening Social and Physical Environments

 
James S. House, Karl R. Landis, and Debra Umberson
Reading 8 Social Relationships and Health
Eric Klinenberg
Reading 9 Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation
The Social and Cultural Meanings of Illness

 
Abigail C. Saguy and Kjerstin Gruys
Reading 10 Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders
Sara Rubin, Nancy Burke, Meredith Van Natta, Irene Yen, and Janet K. Shim
Reading 11 Like a Fish out of Water: Managing Chronic Pain in the Urban Safety Net
Elizabeth M. Armstrong, Daniel P. Carpenter, and Marie Hojnacki
Reading 12 Whose Deaths Matter?: Mortality, Advocacy, and Attention to Disease in the Mass Media
The Experience of Illness

 
Kristin K. Barker
Reading 13 Electronic Support Groups, Patient-Consumers, and Medicalization: The Case of Contested Illness
Peter Conrad
Reading 14 The Meaning of Medications: Another Look at Compliance
 
PART II THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MEDICAL CARE
The Rise and Fall of the Dominance of Medicine

 
Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider
Reading 15 Professionalization, Monopoly, and the Structure of Medical Practice
Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz
Reading 16 Notes on the Decline of Midwives and the Rise of Medical Obstetricians
John B. McKinlay and Lisa D. Marceau
Reading 17 The End of the Golden Age of Doctoring
Other Providers In and Out of Medicine

 
Susan Reverby
Reading 18 A Caring Dilemma: Womanhood and Nursing in Historical Perspective
Rochelle Einboden
Reading 19 SuperNurse? Troubling the Hero Discourse in COVID Times
Maayan Roichman
Reading 20 Becoming a Complementary Health Practitioner: The Construction of Alternative Medical Knowledge
Pharmaceuticalization

 
Peter Conrad and Valerie Leiter
Reading 21 From Lydia Pinkham to Queen Levitra: Direct-to-Consumer Advertising and Medicalisation
Jonathan Gabe, Catherine M. Coveney, and Simon J. Williams
Reading 22 Prescriptions and Proscriptions: Moralising Sleep Medicines
Jennifer A. Reich
Reading 23 Vaccine Refusal and Pharmaceutical Acquiescence: Parental Control and Ambivalence in Managing Children’s Health
Financing Medical Care

 
Thomas Bodenheimer and Kevin Grumbach
Reading 24 Paying for Health Care
Jill Quadagno
Reading 25 The Origins of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Medicine in Practice

 
Elliot G. Mishler
Reading 26 The Struggle Between the Voice of Medicine and the Voice of the Lifeworld
Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo
Reading 27 Cultural Brokerage: Creating Linkages Between Voices of Lifeworld and Medicine in Cross-Cultural Clinical Settings
Glenda M. Flores
Reading 28 Latina Physicians as “Essential” Workers
Alexander J. Martos, Patrick A. Wilson, Allegra R. Gordon, Marguerita Lightfoot, and Ilan H. Meyer
Reading 29 “Like Finding a Unicorn”: Healthcare Preferences Among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People in the United States
Stefan Timmermans
Reading 30 Social Death as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Stefan Timmermans and Rebecca Kaufman
Reading 31 Technologies and Health Inequities
Rhonda Shaw
Reading 32 Being-in-Dialysis: The Experience of the Machine–Body for Home Dialysis Users
Susan Markens
Reading 33 “It Just Becomes Much More Complicated”: Genetic Counselors’ Views on Genetics and Prenatal Testing
 
Part III Contemporary Critical Debates
The Relevance of Risk

 
Deborah Lupton
Reading 34 Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health
Kristin Kay Barker
Reading 35 Lay Pharmacovigilance and the Dramatization of Risk: Fluoroquinolone Harm on YouTube
Andrea Laurent-Simpson and Celia C. Lo
Reading 36 Risk society online: Zika virus, social media and distrust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Peter Conrad
Reading 37 The Shifting Engines of Medicalization
Claudia Malacrida and Tiffany Boulton
Reading 38 The Best Laid Plans?: Women’s Choices, Expectations and Experiences in Childbirth
Theresa Morris
Reading 39 C-Section Epidemic
 
Part IV Expanding Health and Health Care
Illness, Medicine, and the Internet

 
Peter Conrad, Julia Bandini, and Alexandria Vasquez
Reading 40 Illness and the Internet: From Private to Public Experience
Joanna Kempner and John Bailey
Reading 41 Collective Self-experimentation in Patient-led Research: How Online Health Communities Foster Innovation
Deborah Lupton and Annemarie Jutel
Reading 42 “It’s Like Having a Physician in Your Pocket!”: A Critical Analysis of Self-Diagnosis Smartphone Apps
Prevention, Movements, and Social Change

 
Martha Powers, Phil Brown, Grace Poudrier, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Alissa Cordner, Cole Alder, and Marina Goreau Atlas
Reading 43 COVID-19 as Eco-Pandemic Injustice: Opportunities for Collective and Antiracist Approaches to Environmental Health
John McKnight
Reading 44 Politicizing Health Care

For instructors

Select a Purchasing Option