Medical Power and Social Knowledge

This new edition includes a completely revised chapter on mental health, new chapters on the sociology of the body and on the relationship between health and risk in contemporary societies. Author Bryan S. Turner assesses the ways in which different social theorists have interpreted the experience of health and disease and the social relations and power structures involved in the medical practice. He examines health as an aspect of social action and looks at the problem of health at three levels-the individual, the social, and the societal. Among the perspectives analyzed are Parsons′s view of the "sick role" and the patient′s relation to society, Foucault′s critique of medical models of madness and sexuality, Marxist and feminist debates on the relation of health and medicine to capitalism and patriarchy, and the contribution of Beck to the sociological understanding of environmental pollution and hazard in the politics of health. The fully revised edition of this successful textbook, Medical Power and Social Knowledge, Second Edition, provides a comprehensive introduction to medical sociology and an assessment of its significance for social theory and the social sciences.

Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology in the Asian Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. Previously he was Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge from 1998-2005. His research interests include globalization and religion, concentrating on such issues as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronic information, religious, consumerism and youth cultures, human rights and religion, the human body, medical change, and religious cosmologies. He is Joint Chief Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals.