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9780814786857

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In this cutting-edge book, Janet Shim meticulous unearths the inner logic of epidemiology to show how the familiar categories of race, gender, and class are inserted into medical knowledge in ways that strip them of social significance. Her fascinating interviews reveal a broad gulf between how experts conceive of the causes of health inequalities and how ordinary people caught in webs of social disadvantage understand what makes them sick. Heart-Sick takes a vexing and high-stakes question--Who gets sick and why?--and sharply reframes it from a new vantage point. -Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research and Impure Science: AIDS, Ac

Shim made a very important contribution to understanding the culture of science, the diversity of 'knowledges' in a society, and multiplicity and intersectionality of social variables in the real lives of real people that must be included in science. -Anthropology Review In this cutting-edge book, Janet Shim meticulous unearths the inner logic of epidemiology to show how the familiar categories of race, gender, and class are inserted into medical knowledge in ways that strip them of social significance. Her fascinating interviews reveal a broad gulf between how experts conceive of the causes of health inequalities and how ordinary people caught in webs of social disadvantage understand what makes them sick. Heart-Sick takes a vexing and high-stakes question-Who gets sick and why?-and sharply reframes it from a new vantage point. -Steven Epstein,author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research This thought-provoking book will make everyone, and especially sociologists, think deeply about how to assess not only their own 'risks' but also the research on heart disease. It is a book that not only medical sociologists will find worthwhile, but also practitioners, as well as scholars who study the history of medicine and professions, science and technology, and the epidemiology of health and disease. -American Journal of Sociology [...] Shim's careful analytical and ethnographic detail stands as both cautionary tale and sign of hope. For we cannot improve our knowledge of a problem like cardiovascular disease without understanding the problems of our knowledge itself. Shim's Heartsick does both well. -Medical Anthropology Quarterly Janet Shim has produced a carefully crafted 'big picture' overview of the competing explanations of the incidence of heart disease. This is an important contribution to such disparate fields as epidemiology, the expanding literature in science studies, and sociological theories of race and class that attempt to account for health disparities. -Troy Duster,author, Backdoor to Eugenics

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Janet K. Shim is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco.

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