`An intelligent and informed account of medical sociology. Simon Williams has produced an original and comprehensive sociological statement of the centrality of the body to an understanding of medicine, health and illness. His scope is impressive... It will shape future teaching and research in the field of health and illness' - Bryan S Turner, Professor of Sociology, University of Cambridge This is a clear, well-written account of medicine, health and the body. Taking recent debates on the body and society as its point of departure, the book critically reexamines a series of embodied issues and emotional agendas in health and illness. Included here are cutting edge discussions and debates concerning: - the medicalized body - health inequalities - childhood and ageing - the dilemmas of high-tech medicine - chronic illness and disability - caring and (bio)ethics - sleep, death and dying - the body in late/postmodernity Written in an accessible, engaging style, with many original and innovative insights, the book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students alike, and to researchers and lecturers with an interest in the embodied agendas of health and medicine in the new millennium.

Caring Bodies/Embodied Ethics

Caring bodies/embodied ethics

One of the key dimensions of embodiment, as we have seen, concerns our emotional relations with the world and with other similarly embodied human beings, with all the contingencies this implies. Issues of sickness and health, disability and death, as the foregoing chapters attest, throw many of these issues into critical relief. It is time, however, to address more fully and directly the embodied dimensions and ethical dilemmas of caring as such, itself a prime expression of the gendered division of labour across the public/private divide. Frank's (1991a) notion of the ‘communicative’ body as a mode of praxis, based on the medium of recognition, provides a useful starting point here: a body (more an ideal than a reality) which is ...

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