Introduction to the Handbook on the Sociology of Health and Medicine

Abstract

Issues of health and medicine affect everyone. From birth to death, people are likely to suffer many episodes of illness and have numerous encounters with the institutions of medicine and healthcare, to gain expert advice, and/or treatment or care for themselves or for others. However, disease and illness, and medicine and healthcare are multifaceted realities that impact people's lives in different ways and to varying degrees. As sociologists have long argued, the question of how we experience and understand and respond to life events such as illness and dying vary greatly through time and across societies and contexts. Social processes and structures, traditions, and beliefs profoundly shape knowledge and practices relating to all such events. That health and illness and medicine and healthcare have many socio-cultural dimensions has been abundantly illustrated during the COVID-19 pandemic.'Medicine' itself is not one reality but rather many realities, or bodies of knowledge and practice, that vary through time and across societies. However, a particular form of medicine, namely biomedicine, has come to dominate healthcare systems around the world and profoundly shape thinking about the body, health and illness, and wellbeing. Writing more than four decades ago, UK sociologist Raymond Illsley (1980) wrote about the 'disease-oriented and hospital-centred' character of the health system and how this had little impact on inequality or life expectations, and that prevention had much greater scope for reducing disease and death. Other sociologists before and since have made similar observations, highlighting how socio-cultural contexts and politico-economic conditions shape people's experiences of health and illness and views on and approaches to disease, diagnosis, and treatment.This handbook includes some of the substantial theoretical and empirical research undertaken by sociologists who study health and medicine, examining the kinds of questions they pursue and the theoretical perspectives and methods they use to help answer them. The topic of health and medicine encompasses an extremely broad domain of enquiry with ever-shifting boundaries, and sociology perspectives are diverse, making it impossible to cover the full range of topics explored and perspectives adopted by researchers. Some readers will no doubt identify gaps in my coverage of topics. In the event, it is not clear what 'comprehensiveness' would mean in a collection such as this, especially given the rapidly changing research landscape. However, I have attempted to include a diverse range of topics that sociologists research. Defining the scope of the sociology of health and medicine (including healthcare) is complicated by the fact that, in some conceptions, it incorporates or overlaps with the sociology of risk, the sociology of the body, the sociology of emotions, the sociology of ageing, gender studies, studies of science and technology, and other specialist areas, some of which have their own journals, events, and organisations.Researchers fro...