The Social Construction of Medicine and the Body
- 1 January 2000
- book chapter
- Published by SAGE Publications
Abstract
This chapter examines the social construction of ideas, knowledge, and individual's experiences of health and medicine in Western societies, using an interdisciplinary approach. The central argument of the chapter is that health, illness and disease, and health care may all be viewed as sociocultural products, and that it is therefore important to analyze the nature of their social and cultural representations and the symbolic meanings that surround them. In addressing these issues, the perspective of what may loosely be called ‘social constructionism’ is employed. There is not the space here to cover the full range of social constructionist analyses of medicine, health, and illness, particularly as this perspective is found across ...Keywords
This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: