Medical power and social knowledge

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Medical Sociology Religion and Medicine From Sin to Sickness PART TWO: CONCEPTS OF DISEASE AND SICKNESS On Being Sick Madness and Psychiatry - Colin Samson Women's Complaints Patriarchy and Illness Aging, Dying and Death PART THREE: SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MEDICAL POWER Professions, Knowledge and Power Medical Bureaucracies The Hospital, the Clinic and Modern Society Capitalism, Class and Illness Comparative Health Systems The Globalization of Medical Power PART FOUR: CONCLUSION The Regulation of Bodies Risk Society and the New Regime of Disease The Expanding Field of the Sociology of the Body.

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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.