The Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness & Healing advances the understanding of medical sociology by identifying the most important contemporary challenges to the field and suggesting directions for future inquiry. The editors provide a blueprint for guiding research and teaching agendas for the first quarter of the 21st century. In a series of essays, this volume offers a systematic view of the critical questions that face our understanding of the role of social forces in health, illness and healing. It also provides an overall theoretical framework and asks medical sociologists to consider the implications of taking on new directions and approaches. Such issues may include the importance of multiple levels of influences, the utility of dynamic, life course approaches, the role of culture, the impact of social networks, the importance of fundamental causes approaches, and the influences of state structures and policy making.

This text takes a step in pointing new directions for sociological and social-historical studies of health and health care. Throughout the book, the division of labour in health care, especially as it relates to social class and gender divisions, is taken as central.

Traditionally, medical sociology texts have been written from a medical perspective, focusing primarily on health issues as they have been defined by doctors, and often reading much like health education textbooks. Weitz, instead, adopts a critical perspective, sometimes challenging medical perspectives, sometimes raising broader issues beyond those of interest to the medical world. This perspective, which is more thoroughly sociological, is now more common among instructors than the older medical perspective.

This volume establishes the discipline of medical ethnomusicology and expresses its broad potential. It also is an expression of a wider paradigm shift of innovative thinking and collaboration that fully embraces both the health sciences and the healing arts.

With thorough coverage of inequality in health care access and practice, this leading textbook has been widely acclaimed by teachers as the most accessible of any available. It introduces and integrates recent research in medical sociology and emphasizes the importance of race, class, gender throughout. This new edition leads students through the complexities of the evolving Affordable Care Act. It significantly expands coverage of medical technology, end-of-life issues, and alternative and complementary health care—topics students typically debate in the classroom. Many new textboxes and enhancements in pedagogy grace this new edition, which is essential in the fast-changing area of health care. New to this Edition *More textboxes relating the social aspects of medicine to students' lives *Expanded coverage leading students through the complex impacts of the ACA and health care reform *Expanded coverage of medical technology, end-of-life issues, and alternative and complementary health care *'Health and the Internet' sections updated and renovated toward student assignments *New, end of chapter lists of terms *Updated test bank

This title integrates the conceptual, empirical and evidence-based threads of mental health as an area of study, research and practice. It approaches mental health from two perspectives - firstly as a positive state of well-being and secondly as psychological difference or abnormality in its social context.

The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology provides a contemporary overview of the key themes in medical anthropology. In this exciting departure from conventional handbooks, compendia and encyclopedias, the three editors have written the core chapters of the volume, and in so doing, invite the reader to reflect on the ethnographic richness and theoretical contributions of research on the clinic and the field, bioscience and medical research, infectious and non-communicable diseases, biomedicine, complementary and alternative modalities, structural violence and vulnerability, gender and ageing, reproduction and sexuality. As a way of illustrating the themes, a rich variety of case studies are included, presented by over 60 authors from around the world, reflecting the diverse cultural contexts in which people experience health, illness, and healing. Each chapter and its case studies are introduced by a photograph, reflecting medical and visual anthropological responses to inequality and vulnerability. An indispensible reference in this fastest growing area of anthropological study, The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology is a unique and innovative contribution to the field.