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This book is based on collective research carried out during the 1980s. This edition appears ten years after the original publication in French. Since then we have experienced many changes. In the late decade, disciplines have changed, as have the societies being researched. The outbreak of AIDS in Africa and the industrial world is not the least of these major and influential changes. The reader today will be sensitive to these changes and this research maintains its value as an intellectual endeavour and a useful model.
A wide-ranging collection of both classic writings and more recent articles in the sociology of health and illness, this reader is organized into the following sections: * health beliefs and knowledge * inequalities and patterning of health and illness * professional and patient interaction * chronic illness and disability * evaluation and politics in health care. With a thorough introduction which sets the scene for the field as a whole, and section introductions which contextualize each chapter, the reader includes a number of different perspectives on health and illness, is international in scope, and will provide an invaluable resource to students across a wide range of courses in sociology and the social sciences.
Is the way in which we perceive illness a development of the nineteenth century, when the calamitous epidemics of earlier times gave way to the new scourge of tuberculosis? The authors take an extraordinarily wide-ranging and provocative look at illness as a social phenomenon from the Middle Ages to the present- and uncover the multiple ideas and realities behind what we have come to call "a sick person." Drawing upon the history of medicine and mentalities, on literary representations as well as on hundreds of conversation with people suffering from or living with disease, the authors have explored the very different ways in which every society structures illness and the status of the ill in accord with its own values. And they have explicated the changing ways in which the sick have perceived the presence of illness in their own bodies, have absorbed the medical knowledge of their time, and have sought to give meaning to their sufferings. -- From Book Jacket.
This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.
This text takes a step in pointing new directions for sociological and social-historical studies of health and health care. Throughout the book, the division of labour in health care, especially as it relates to social class and gender divisions, is taken as central.
Pastor Fritz Jahr used the term bioethics as early as 1927. It was not until the early 1970s that the term was rediscovered in the United States. Since then, the relevance of this emergent academic field of studies has permanently been growing, as the age of biotechnological and medical innovations has only just begun. Enormous progress can be expected in various areas relevant to bioethical discourses in the coming decades and centuries. In the past years, the invention of CRISPR/Cas9 has radically changed the possibilities concerning genetic modifications, even germline modifications have turned into a practical option. These developments need to be investigated by academics from various disciplines, which is the reason why the conference series on Bioethics in the New Age of Science was initialized. The present volume consists in selected papers from the first International Conference on Bioethics in the New Age of Science, which took place on the 4th and 5th of May 2017 at the "Vasile Goldis" West University of Arad, Romania.
We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of generations ago. This text tells the story of the modern experience of illness, linking ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism.
An authoritative, topical, and comprehensive reference to the key concepts and most important traditional and contemporary issues in medical sociology. Contains 35 chapters by recognized experts in the field, both established and rising young scholars Covers standard topics in the field as well as new and engaging issues such as bioterrorism, bioethics, and infectious disease Chapters are thematically arranged to cover the major issues of the sub-discipline Global range of contributors and an international perspective
"Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of one of the most paradoxically popular figures in transatlantic theatre history: the stage consumptive. Consumption, or tuberculosis, remains one of the world's most deadly epidemic diseases; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, it was a leading killer, responsible for the deaths of as many as one in four members of the population. Despite-or perhaps because of-their horrific experiences of tubercular mortality, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century audiences in these same countries flocked to see consumptive characters love, suffer, and die onstage. Beginning with th...
Terminal illness and the pain and anguish it brings are experiences that have touched millions of people in the past and continue to shape our experience of the present. Hospital machines that artificially support life and monitor vital signs beg the question: Is there not anything that medical science can offer as solace? Incurable and Intolerable looks at the history of incurable illness from a variety of perspectives, including those of doctors, patients, families, religious counsel, and policy makers. This compellingly documented and well-written history illuminates the physical, emotional, social, and existential consequences of chronic disease and terminal illness, and offers an original look at the world of palliative medicine, politics, religion, and charity. Revealing the ways in which history can shed new light on contemporary thinking, Jason Szabo encourages a more careful scrutiny of today's attitudes, policies, and practices surrounding "imminent death" and its effects on society.