The Sociology of Health and Illness

Peter Conrad is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Brandeis University. His work focuses on the sociology of health and illness, deviance, medicalization, new genetics, and the sociology of ADHD. He has published over 100 articles and a dozen books, including The Medicalization of Society (2007), and most recently, coedited Global Perspectives on ADHD (2018). He received the Lee Founder’s Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (for lifetime contributions) and the Leo G. Reeder Award for “outstanding contributions to medical Sociology” from the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Valerie Leiter is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Simmons College. She received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies. Much of her work focuses on children and youth with disabilities, including her book, Their Time has Come: Youth with Disabilities on the Cusp of Adulthood (Rutgers University Press). She has two current projects, one focused on individuals′ experiences with autoimmune conditions, and the other on the Food and Drug Administration′s regulation of women′s health medical devices. Her teaching addresses health and illness, disability, children and youth, and sociological methods.

Part I The Social Production of Disease and Meanings of Illness
The Social Nature of Disease
Reading 1 Medical Measures and the Decline of Mortality - John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay
Reading 2 Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities: Theory, Evidence, and Practice - Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, and Parisa Tehranifar
Who Gets Sick? The Unequal Social Distribution of Disease
Reading 3 Social Class, Susceptibility, and Sickness - S. Leonard Syme and Lisa F. Berkman
Reading 4 Racism and Health: Pathways and Scientific Evidence - David R. Williams and Selina A. Mohammed
Reading 5 Sex, Gender, and Vulnerability - Rachel C. Snow
Reading 6 Health Inequalities in Global Context - Jason Beckfield, Sigrun Olafsdottir, and Elyas Bakhtiari
Reading 7 A Case for Refocusing Upstream: The Political Economy of Illness - John B. McKinlay
Our Sickening Social and Physical Environments
Reading 8 Social Relationships and Health - James S. House, Karl R. Landis, and Debra Umberson
Reading 9 Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation - Eric Klinenberg
The Social and Cultural Meanings of Illness
Reading 10 Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders - Abigail C. Saguy and Kjerstin Gruys
Reading 11 Like a Fish out of Water: Managing Chronic Pain in the Urban Safety Net - Sara Rubin, Nancy Burke, Meredith Van Natta, Irene Yen, and Janet K. Shim
Reading 12 Whose Deaths Matter?: Mortality, Advocacy, and Attention to Disease in the Mass Media - Elizabeth M. Armstrong, Daniel P. Carpenter, and Marie Hojnacki
The Experience of Illness
Reading 13 Electronic Support Groups, Patient-Consumers, and Medicalization: The Case of Contested Illness - Kristin K. Barker
Reading 14 The Meaning of Medications: Another Look at Compliance - Peter Conrad
PART II THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MEDICAL CARE
The Rise and Fall of the Dominance of Medicine
Reading 15 Professionalization, Monopoly, and the Structure of Medical Practice - Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider
Reading 16 Notes on the Decline of Midwives and the Rise of Medical Obstetricians - Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz
Reading 17 The End of the Golden Age of Doctoring - John B. McKinlay and Lisa D. Marceau
Other Providers In and Out of Medicine
Reading 18 A Caring Dilemma: Womanhood and Nursing in Historical Perspective - Susan Reverby
Reading 19 SuperNurse? Troubling the Hero Discourse in COVID Times - Rochelle Einboden
Reading 20 Becoming a Complementary Health Practitioner: The Construction of Alternative Medical Knowledge - Maayan Roichman
Pharmaceuticalization
Reading 21 From Lydia Pinkham to Queen Levitra: Direct-to-Consumer Advertising and Medicalisation - Peter Conrad and Valerie Leiter
Reading 22 Prescriptions and Proscriptions: Moralising Sleep Medicines - Jonathan Gabe, Catherine M. Coveney, and Simon J. Williams
Reading 23 Vaccine Refusal and Pharmaceutical Acquiescence: Parental Control and Ambivalence in Managing Children’s Health - Jennifer A. Reich
Financing Medical Care
Reading 24 Paying for Health Care - Thomas Bodenheimer and Kevin Grumbach
Reading 25 The Origins of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - Jill Quadagno
Medicine in Practice
Reading 26 The Struggle Between the Voice of Medicine and the Voice of the Lifeworld - Elliot G. Mishler
Reading 27 Cultural Brokerage: Creating Linkages Between Voices of Lifeworld and Medicine in Cross-Cultural Clinical Settings - Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo
Reading 28 Latina Physicians as “Essential” Workers - Glenda M. Flores
Reading 29 “Like Finding a Unicorn”: Healthcare Preferences Among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People in the United States - Alexander J. Martos, Patrick A. Wilson, Allegra R. Gordon, Marguerita Lightfoot, and Ilan H. Meyer
Reading 30 Social Death as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Stefan Timmermans
Reading 31 Technologies and Health Inequities - Stefan Timmermans and Rebecca Kaufman
Reading 32 Being-in-Dialysis: The Experience of the Machine–Body for Home Dialysis Users - Rhonda Shaw
Reading 33 “It Just Becomes Much More Complicated”: Genetic Counselors’ Views on Genetics and Prenatal Testing - Susan Markens
Part III Contemporary Critical Debates
The Relevance of Risk
Reading 34 Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health - Deborah Lupton
Reading 35 Lay Pharmacovigilance and the Dramatization of Risk: Fluoroquinolone Harm on YouTube - Kristin Kay Barker
Reading 36 Risk society online: Zika virus, social media and distrust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - Andrea Laurent-Simpson and Celia C. Lo
Reading 37 The Shifting Engines of Medicalization - Peter Conrad
Reading 38 The Best Laid Plans?: Women’s Choices, Expectations and Experiences in Childbirth - Claudia Malacrida and Tiffany Boulton
Reading 39 C-Section Epidemic - Theresa Morris
Part IV Expanding Health and Health Care
Illness, Medicine, and the Internet
Reading 40 Illness and the Internet: From Private to Public Experience - Peter Conrad, Julia Bandini, and Alexandria Vasquez
Reading 41 Collective Self-experimentation in Patient-led Research: How Online Health Communities Foster Innovation - Joanna Kempner and John Bailey
Reading 42 “It’s Like Having a Physician in Your Pocket!”: A Critical Analysis of Self-Diagnosis Smartphone Apps - Deborah Lupton and Annemarie Jutel
Prevention, Movements, and Social Change
Reading 43 COVID-19 as Eco-Pandemic Injustice: Opportunities for Collective and Antiracist Approaches to Environmental Health - Martha Powers, Phil Brown, Grace Poudrier, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Alissa Cordner, Cole Alder, and Marina Goreau Atlas
Reading 44 Politicizing Health Care - John McKnight