For the first time, life expectancy is declining in an industrialized society. In this pioneering work, William C. Cockerham examines the social causes of the decline in life expectancy beginning in the 1960s including: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and East Germany. "Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe" argues that the roots of this change are mainly social rather than biomedical - the result of poor policy decisions, stress and an unhealthy diet. Cockerham presents a theory of postmodern social change that goes beyond the borders of Eastern Europe.

This book is based on a substantial collection of video recordings of everyday medical consultations in the UK, and offers a micro-analysis of the visual and vocal aspects of the interaction between doctors and patients. Using actual examples, accompanied by numerous illustrations, Christian Health explores the moment-by-moment coordination of body movement and speech by and between doctor and patient. He discusses various aspects of medical examination, leavetaking, and the ways in which the participants sustain each other's attention. He also raises certain practical issues of medical work, such as the use of records and computers during the consultation, and the impact of 'bureaucratic' demands on the flow of information between doctor and patient. The book reveals the delicacy and precision which enter into the articulation and synchrony of visual behaviour and speech, and throws light on the systematics - the social organization - underlying the seeming minutiae of everyday life. In this way, it contributes both to our understanding of doctor-patient communication, and to the growing body of research on face-to-face interaction.

In this powerful and probing look at the reality of everyday choices in neonatal intensive care units, Renée Anspach explores the life-and-death dilemmas that have fueled national debate. Using case studies taken during sixteen months of extensive interviewing and observation, Anspach examines the roles of parents, doctors, nurses, and bioethicists in deciding whether critically ill newborns--be they premature, terminally ill, or severely malformed--should be saved by medical technology, or at least kept alive a little longer.

Through observations in three intensive care units, this book draws on the reality of practice to explore how nurses and doctors work in intensive care settings. It examines: the power held by the competing knowledge bases; the roles of the different professions; the decision-making process; the sources of conflict; the need for change. Drawing together sociological theories and clinical practice, Power and Conflict Between Doctors and Nurses explores the role of nurses in delivering contemporary health care. It makes a strong case for interdisciplinary working and is particularly timely when health care policy is challenging work boundaries in health care.

Beverley McNamara looks at death from a sociological perspective. Arguing that despite popular belief death does not make us equal, she shows that dying is a chaotic and uncertain process. Yet despite the disorderly manner in which people die, McNamara demonstrates that social and cultural patterns can be found in the way we approach dying and the care of terminally ill people. She examines the medicalisation of care for the dying, attitudes of carers and the notion of the 'good death'. She also explores the euthanasia debate and our fear of cancer. Drawing on wide-ranging qualitative research, Fragile Lives is a sensitive analysis of the social issues surrounding death.

Medical sociology was first recognizable as a distinct area of study in the 1950s and is now probably the largest specialized area of sociology. This collection comprises a comprehensive statement of the history, current concerns and relevance of medical sociology to an understanding of health and health care worldwide.

Questioning the myth of unconditional love between parents and children, this study examines the strength of the parental bond when children are born with physical defects. The author studied parents' behavior toward 1,450 children born with defects in three hospitals in Israel, and then conducted follow-up studies over a period of six years with 200 families in their homes. One of the major recurring patterns of parental behavior was a massive tendency toward rejection of deformed children. Rejection was manifested by parents' wishes for drastic separation from their children through abandonment, institutionalization, or giving up for adoption. If brought home, the children were isolated and hidden from view. Weiss found that half of the newborns with physically observable defects were abandoned by their parents in the hospital. Even when the parents were assured by doctors that their children would develop intellectually or would not require special care, the tendency to abandon remained strong. Normal children who suffered physical deformity due to burns or other accidents were similarly rejected by their parents. This study will take a major place in the literature on human behavior because through exhaustive and long-term observation of actual behavior in thousands of individual situations, it exposes the extreme importance of physical appearance in interpersonal relations. The author describes how the deformity causes confusion in the parents' cognitive system, labelling the child with a name such as monster or devil or creature, or another non-human category. Parents' reactions to their children's body image are discussed and the concept of body boundaries is analyzed. Children connected to medical apparatus or sickly children are the cause of much parental rejection. Also, territorial restrictions are placed on the deformed child in the home. These range from closeting or imprisoning in unfurnished surroundings separate from the family to demotion to servant status within the family. This study refutes most assumptions in the literature and shows that forming bonds with one's biological child is not necessarily spontaneous, automatic, or natural, and that every child undergoes a process of adoption or rejection based on external appearance and whether or not that appearance matches the parents' image of a "person." Hospital personnel, social workers, sociologists and anthropologists will be profoundly influenced by this work, as will be all others who read it.

This book focuses on the social situation of the hospitalized child in twentieth-century America. It contends that the children's hospital has many of the characteristics of depersonalization and enforced helplessness that are associated with other "total institutions" in our society. The book also examines the interpersonal approaches employed by staff and patients in dealing with the tensions created by the reality of the total institution, on the one hand, and the more idealistic goals of the children's hospital, on the other. The observations that underlie this book were carried out by participant observation in two hospitals. In "County Hospital," where observations were carried out in 1971 and 1972, the researcher also acted as a visitor to ill children. At "Metropolis," observations were carried out in the admissions area, the waiting rooms, and on the floors, where the researcher acted both as a worker with the play-therapists and as a visitor. Extensive notes were made at the end of each day. Ongoing fieldnotes were maintained and written in unobtrusive areas such as in meetings or in the lobbies. This material was occasionally reinforced by notes taken in other hospital settings. Chapters include discussion of the role of person-in-a-total-institution, socialization for patienting, and coping strategies of children and hospital staff.

Pain--it is the most common complaint presented to physicians. Yet pain is subjective--it cannot be measured directly and is difficult to validate. Evaluating claims based on pain poses major problems for the Social Security Administration (SSA) and other disability insurers. This volume covers the epidemiology and physiology of pain; psychosocial contributions to pain and illness behavior; promising ways of assessing and measuring chronic pain and dysfunction; clinical aspects of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation; and how the SSA's benefit structure and administrative procedures may affect pain complaints.

Bryan Turner's book provides a framework for the development of a new sub-field, namely the development of the body. Through an examination of various philosophical traditions (phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, structuralism and postmodernism) the book shows how the human body has been ignored or neglected by mainstream social theory. In attempting to integrate these different traditions, Professor Turner demonstrates how the absent body has impoverished, not only the sociology of health and illness but also the very foundations of sociology itself. There are three major aspects to this argument. Firstly, it is impossible to develop an adequate theory of social action without a conception of the embodied social agent. Secondly the idea of embodiment offers a fundamental critique of the positivistic side of the medical model of illness, and thus offers a new theoretical basis for medical sociology. Thirdly following the work of Michel Foucault, Turner demonstrates that medical practice functions as a moral discourse, which produces a regulation of the body. In providing a general account of the problem of the body in modern society, this study attempts to solve many of the existing epistemological and theoretical difficulties in social theories of the body. Turner has provided a major synthesis of his earlier work on the sociology of the body, established the idea of embodiment as fundamental to the sociology of health and illness, and pointed the way forward to new areas of cultural analysis.

A study of the process of dying in American hospitals focuses upon discernible recurrent patterns of interaction between staff members, terminally ill patients, and their families. Strauss and Glaser suppose that the expectation of death by both the dying and the relatives are a key to understanding the interactions between those people. Their choice of hospitals and stations allowed them to compare various kinds of expectations. On a premature infant station, mortality was high but the patients were not aware of their impeding deaths, while on an oncology station, dying was slow and differences in the awareness of dying were very pronounced. The hypothesis results in a theory on the influence of awareness on the interaction with dying people.

The German sociologist and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, aided the understanding of the nature of social change in the context of global capitalism. This book provides an introduction to his work and shows how his theories can be applied to a wide range of topics in the sociology of health and illness. In the light of Habermas' theories, the authors look at: the nature of lay health knowledge; the doctor-patient relationship; decision-making in health care; and rationing health care.

Many healthcare professionals are focusing their concerns on controlling symptoms and minimizing physical distress while failing to deal with the social and psychological factors related to living with long-term chronic illness. Ariela Royer makes an important contribution to the study of health and illness behavior by showing the various strategies chronically ill people use to manage their symptoms and overcome the consequences of their particular illness, so they can live the most normal life possible and maintain their self-esteem. In spite of the popular belief linking chronic illness mainly to aging, most chronic problems extend across the life span. The author shows various strategies the chronically ill may use to live with the uncertainty inherent in chronic illness. She also discusses how one might try to overcome or to minimize the salient social consequences of chronic illness, such as stigma and social isolation, in order to get on with their lives.

The fifth edition of the classic textbook on sociology of medicine. The author explores the origins, nature and context of illness in society, and provides a framework for understanding the relationship between health, health care and the society in which it occurs. The fifth edition is revised in light of recent research and changes in healthcare provision. There are also new topics such as clinical governance, managed care, and managed competition.

In examining why it is that people with higher socioeconomic status have better health than lower-status individuals, Mirowsky and Ross utilizes their strength in survey research on a broad national scale. Drawing on findings and ideas from many sciences, including demography, economics, social psychology, and the health sciences, they argue that education creates most of the association between higher social status and better health. People who are well educated feel in control of their lives, which encourages a healthy lifestyle. In addition, learned effectiveness, a practical end of that education, enables them to find work that is autonomous and creative, thereby promoting good health. The benefits of education to health are pervasive, cumulative, and self-amplifying, growing across the life course. In this book, the authors challenge received notions in medical sociology and public health, while extending the effects of social stratification.

Among the developed countries it is not the richest societies which have the best health, but those which have the smallest income differences between rich and poor. Inequality and relative poverty have absolute effects: they increase death rates. But why? How can smaller income differences raise average life expectancy? Using examples from the USA, Britain, Japan and Eastern Europe, and bringing together evidence from the social and medical sciences, Unhealthy Socities provides the explanation. Healthy, egalitarian societies are more socially cohesive. They have a stronger community life and suffer fewer of the corrosive effects of inequality. As well as inequality weakening the social fabric, damaging health and increasing crime rates, Unhealthy Societies shows that social cohesion is crucial to the quality of life. The contrast between the material success and social failure of modern societies marks an imbalance which needs attention. The relationship between health and equality suggests that important social needs will go unmet without a larger measure of social and distributive justice.

The author provides an interpretation of historical events that intertwine the history of medical sociology with changes in medical science and education; with the changing economics, politics and practices of health care; with shifting social values; and with the changing nature, status, and major concerns of sociology.

The new sociology of sexuality has a two-fold aim: to demonstrate how the social shapes the sexual; and to analyse how the sexual in turn becomes a focal point for personal identity, cultural anxiety value debates and political action. Drawing on papers from the 1994 British Sociological Association annual conference on 'Sexualities in Social Context', this volume brings together key contributors to this stimulating new approach. Topics covered include theoretical developments, the relationship between history and contemporary controversies, community and identity, especially in the context of AIDS, value conflicts and changes in the meanings of intimacy. The book as a whole offers a significant intervention into debates on sexuality, and a thoughtful contribution to the broadening of the sociological agenda.