Handbook of Medical Sociology, Sixth Edition

Preface to the Sixth Edition

vii Preface to the Sixth Edition Chloe E. Bird, Peter Conrad, Allen M. Fremont, and Stefan Timmermans social connections affect health and illness. While we included two chapters on social perspectives on illness experience in the previous edition, we here offer a section that more deeply examines illness experience and trajectories and emphasizes social constructionist approaches. In addition to focusing on macro issues like medicalization and illness contestation, the chapters in the section look at the subjective experience of illness, both as this research tradition has developed in sociology and in light of the profound impact of the Internet. We also offer chapters on sociological perspectives on disability and a sociological rendering of dying and the right to die, an increasingly salient issue. The final two sections address new topics that have increased in significance or that merit an update since the last edition, as well as some classic sociological matters. Chapters in the third section recount shifts in the organization of healthcare delivery and in the balance of power among institutional actors seeking to control it. These chapters pay particular attention to developments in the decade since the last edition of the handbook, including new efforts to reform the system, with special emphasis on emerging actors that warrant sociological attention, such as pharmaceutical companies. Additional chapters in the third section highlight the growing pervasiveness and impact of evolving models of care and policy that are driven by a conviction that greater use of evidence-based medicine and far more emphasis on care quality and safety are crucial to improving care and health outcomes. Chapters in the final section of the book focus on recent and expandA revision of The Handbook of Medical Sociology has appeared about once a decade since its original publication in 1963. Each edition was comprised of new, specially commissioned chapters reviewing or developing some aspects of medical sociology. As the field of medical sociology grew and diversified, new topics were included and older ones updated, and others continued to be represented by previous editions. When a new editorial team took over the fifth edition (Bird, Conrad, and Fremont 2000), we attempted to maintain the spirit of the earlier editions. We continue here with the sixth edition, reflecting some changes and new vistas in medical sociology, while updating and reconfiguring some perennially important topics. In 2009 we celebrated the fiftieth year of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. The section has been among the three largest of the ASA’s nearly thirty sections. Medical sociology continues to be an expanding and vibrant intellectual field: it is impossible for a single volume to fully represent all the changes and new directions, as well as include the discipline ’s core topics. For this edition, we asked authors to go beyond reviews of the literature and focus on a number of key questions and issues. This edition reflects important changes in the study of health and illness. In addition to updated and reconceived chapters on the social impacts of gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities on health, new chapters examine the influence of social networks, neighborhoods, and social capital . This configuration reflects new directions for medical sociology, and increased interest in how viii Handbook of Medical Sociology ing medical sociological interests, as well as on new and future directions for medical sociological work. Health social movements and genetics, while very different, are not only affecting our understandings of illness and disease but also becoming significant sociological research concerns. The issues surrounding religion and spirituality as they relate to health, while not nearly as well developed in our discipline, seem to be returning to the scene. Medical sociologists, along with sociologists of science, continue to shed light on the effects of biotechnology in medicine—its genetic-environment interactions, the impact of biotechnological interventions, or, since 9/11, the threats of bioterrorism . Topics like these may be a harbinger of the future, when medical sociologists may increasingly examine not just how social and cultural organization affect health and illness, but how interactions among culture, organization, and technology contribute to our understanding of and interventions for health and illness. It is likely that sociological research will continue to be eclectic and diverse in its approaches, yet as our own research technologies improve, we may be increasingly able to link sociological factors with changing biomarkers as we attempt to better understand the development of illness and disease. As rich and wide-ranging as we believe the topics in this edition to...