Overview

In recent years medicalization, the process of making something medical, has gained considerable ground and a position in everyday discourse. In this multidisciplinary collection of original essays, the authors expertly consider how issues around medicalization have developed, ways in which it is changing, and the potential shapes it will take in the future. They develop a unique argument that medicalization, biomedicalization, pharmaceuticalization and geneticization are related and co-evolving processes, present throughout the globe. This is an ideal addition to anthropology, sociology and STS courses about medicine and health.

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9781138793705

Table of Contents

Reviews

Technoscience is transforming contemporary health and medicine from the inside out, producing distinctive new processes---biomedicalization, geneticization and pharmaceuticalization. This volume valuably contributes to understanding these processes transnationally in biomedicine and public health, including consequences of neoliberalism. Terrific authors and provocative commentaries make it widely accessible and useful across the social sciences. -Adele E. Clarke, Sociology & History of Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco Noted medical sociologists Susan Bell and Anne Figert have compiled a series of cutting-edge chapters on the world-wide spread of medicalization, pharmaceuticals, and genetic explanations of many behaviors. Highly recommended for courses in medical sociology, medical anthropology, and science and society. -Allan V. Horwitz, Sociology, Rutgers University This is a timely collection of original essays in medicalization. The authors examine topics related to gender, race, and class as they intersect with technoscience and health from a global perspective. This major contribution is an essential reading for any class on health or medicine. -Deborah M. Merrill, Sociology, Clark University This volume provides an excellent overview of the scholarly debate on the process of medicalization and of subsequent concepts, which capture recent trends in theorizing of and developments in medicine, health care and science. The volume is very much needed reading in courses on sociology of health and medicine. - Elianne Riska, Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland This lively edited collection focuses on major trends in medicine and science, illustrating how and where medical categories, pharma and genetics now organize daily life. Most importantly, it investigates the structural factors that make pharma and genetics central and offers tools to forge ahead in the critical analysis of contemporary life. -Kelly Joyce, Director of Master's Program in Science, Technology & Society, Drexel University This collection of highly-readable essays provides distinctly timely perspectives on medicalization and biomedicalization today. The investigation of the spheres of genetics and pharmaceuticals are worthy in their own right, and the essays here also effectively use these focal areas to address important issues of global health, environment, race, and more. -Anne Pollock, Science, Technology, and Culture, Georgia Tech Medicalization remains a bread-and-butter concept for medical sociology courses awakening the sociological imagination. The contributors to this volume expertly explore its limits and promises through the relationship with all things bio, pharma, or genetic. -Stefan Timmermans, Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Information

Susan E. Bell is A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences/Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College. She is the author of DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women’s Health Politics (Temple, 2009) and the guest editor with Alan Radley of a special issue of health, ""Another Way of Knowing: Art, Disease, and Illness Experience,"" 2011. Anne E. Figert is Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Women and the Ownership of PMS: The Structuring of a Psychiatric Disorder (Aldine de Gruyter, 1996) and the co-editor of two volumes: Building Community: Social Science in Action (Pine Forge Press, 1997) and Current Research on Occupations and Professions, volume 9 (JAI Press, Inc, 1996)

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