Summary
Contents
Subject index
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 pe
Medical Bureaucracies: The Hospital, the Clinic and Modern Society
Medical Bureaucracies: The Hospital, the Clinic and Modern Society
The hospital is a crucial institution within modern systems of health care, but it is also symbolic of the social power of the medical profession, representing the institutionalization of specialized medical knowledge. The bureaucratic, centralized hospital system has a significant part to play in the training of doctors and as an institution it controls the organized power of medical professions; it is the locus of contemporary political conflicts which are not simply economic, but ideological and cultural. The very existence of hospitals is a significant statement about the structure of modern societies, especially about the erosion of kinship structures and the household as the framework for the nuclear ...
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