Medicine as culture : illness, disease and the body in Western societies /

Lupton (Charles Sturt Univ., Australia) discusses medicine in its cultural context by incorporating concepts such as social constructionism, in which the human body is seen as both a product of biology and of social and cultural processes. Michel Foucault argued that medicine is an entity that acts on the body; power, which enters into the medical experience, shapes the ways in which persons think about the human body. Medicine, health care, illness, and doctor-patient relationships are cultural activities, amenable to study by sociologists and scholars in the field of cultural dynamics. The institution of medicine plays an integral part in regulating human activity, thought, and social control; it incorporates concepts related to people's perceptions of one another according to gender, sex, class, economics, and political attributes. Lupton's book may serve as an impetus to look at medicine differently: to view the body and its ills not as biological realities but as a combination of analytical processes, practices, and physical matter that has a symbiotic and symbolic relationship with the ideologies that govern societal regulation. This integrated view has challenged sociologists, anthropologists, and historians to study medicine as culture. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Health professionals and generalists. A. R. Davis emerita, Johns Hopkins University