Medical Power and Social Knowledge

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SAGE, Aug 22, 1995 - Social Science - 288 pages
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.

 

Contents

Part I Introduction
1
From Sin to Sickness
18
Part II Concepts of Disease and Sickness
37
Chapter 4 Madness and Psychiatry
55
Patriarchy and Illness
84
Chapter 6 Aging Dying and Death
110
Part III Social Organization of Medical Power
129
the Hospital the clinic and Modern Society
153
Chapter 9 Capitalism Class and Illness
167
The Globalization of Medical Power
191
Part IV Conclusion
204
Chapter 12 Risk Society and the New Regime of Disease
218
Chapter 13 The Expanding Field of the Sociology of the Body
228
References
240
Index
265
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About the author (1995)

Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Asian Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. Previously he was Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge from 1998-2005. His research interests include globalization and religion, concentrating on such issues as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronic information, religious, consumerism and youth cultures, human rights and religion, the human body, medical change, and religious cosmologies. He is Joint Chief Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals.

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