Biomedicine Examined

I: The Social Sciences and Biomedicine.- Relationships between Society, Culture, and Biomedicine: Introduction to the Essays.- II: Mind, Body, Values, and Society.- Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine.- Mind and Body as Metaphors: Hidden Values in Biomedicine.- Psyche, Soma, and Society: The Social Construction of Psychosomatic Disorders.- III: Reproducing Medical Perception and Practice.- Medical Students and the Cadaver in Social and Cultural Context.- Patients, Physicians and Context: Medical Care in the Home.- Discourse, Descriptions and Diagnoses: Reproducing Normal Medicine.- IV: Medicine Evolving, Medicine Adapting.- Space and Time in British General Practice.- Thinking Prevention: Concepts and Constructs in General Practice.- Clinical Science and Clinical Expertise: Changing Boundaries Between Art and Science in Medicine.- V: Medical Construction of life Cycle Processes.- Babyhood: The Social Construction of Infant Care as a Medical Problem in England in the Years Around 1900.- Menopause as Process or Event: The Creation of Definitions in Biomedicine.- On the Boundary of Life and Death: The Definition of Dying by Medical Residents.- VI: Biomedical Knowledge and Practice Across Cultures.- A Nation at Risk: Interpretations of School Refusal in Japan.- Medical Practice in Response to a Folk Illness: The Treatment of Nervios in Costa Rica.- VII: Constructing the “Ordinary” out of the “Extraordinary”.- Physicians and the Disclosure of Undesirable Information.- The Technological Imperative in Medical Practice: The Social Creation of a “Routine” Treatment.- The Social Construction of a Machine: Ritual, Superstition, Magical Thinking and Other Pragmatic Responses to Running a CT Scanner.- List of Contributors.- Author Index.