`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.

Dormant/Mortal Bodies: Sleep, Death and Dying in Late/Postmodernity

Dormant/Mortal Bodies: Sleep, Death and Dying in Late/Postmodernity

Dormant/mortal bodies: Sleep, death and dying in late/postmodernity

How wonderful is Death

Death and his brother Sleep!

One pale as yonder wan and horned moon

With lips of lurid blue

The other glowing like the vital morn.

When throned on ocean's wave

it breathes over the world:

Yet both so passing strange and wonderful!

(Percy Bysshe Shelly, The Daemon of the World, Part I)

This chapter takes a closer look at two further key aspects of embodiment which both, in their different ways, serve to delimit our conscious involvement in social life, at one and the same time as they confirm or, perhaps more appositely, affirm it. The first of these, the dormant corporeal matter of sleep, has surprisingly received scant attention within sociology to date. The ...

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