Reimagining (Bio)medicalization, Pharmaceuticals and Genetics: Old Critiques and New Engagements

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.

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)