This anthology for Medical Sociology courses brings together a collection of readings from the scholarly literature on health, medicine, and health care. covering some of the most timely health issues of our day,

Part I The Social Production of Disease and Meanings of Illness The Social Nature of Disease Reading 1 Medical Measures and the Decline of Mortality - John B. McKinlay and Sonja M. McKinlay Reading 2 Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities: Theory, Evidence, and Practice - Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, and Parisa Tehranifar Who Gets Sick? The Unequal Social Distribution of Disease Reading 3 Social Class, Susceptibility, and Sickness - S. Leonard Syme and Lisa F. Berkman Reading 4 Racism and Health: Pathways and Scientific Evidence - David R. Williams and Selina A. Mohammed Reading 5 Sex, Gender, and Vulnerability - Rachel C. Snow Reading 6 Health Inequalities in Global Context - Jason Beckfield, Sigrun Olafsdottir, and Elyas Bakhtiari Reading 7 A Case for Refocusing Upstream: The Political Economy of Illness - John B. McKinlay Our Sickening Social and Physical Environments Reading 8 Social Relationships and Health - James S. House, Karl R. Landis, and Debra Umberson Reading 9 Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation - Eric Klinenberg The Social and Cultural Meanings of Illness Reading 10 Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders - Abigail C. Saguy and Kjerstin Gruys Reading 11 Like a Fish out of Water: Managing Chronic Pain in the Urban Safety Net - Sara Rubin, Nancy Burke, Meredith Van Natta, Irene Yen, and Janet K. Shim Reading 12 Whose Deaths Matter?: Mortality, Advocacy, and Attention to Disease in the Mass Media - Elizabeth M. Armstrong, Daniel P. Carpenter, and Marie Hojnacki The Experience of Illness Reading 13 Electronic Support Groups, Patient-Consumers, and Medicalization: The Case of Contested Illness - Kristin K. Barker Reading 14 The Meaning of Medications: Another Look at Compliance - Peter Conrad PART II THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MEDICAL CARE The Rise and Fall of the Dominance of Medicine Reading 15 Professionalization, Monopoly, and the Structure of Medical Practice - Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider Reading 16 Notes on the Decline of Midwives and the Rise of Medical Obstetricians - Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz Reading 17 The End of the Golden Age of Doctoring - John B. McKinlay and Lisa D. Marceau Other Providers In and Out of Medicine Reading 18 A Caring Dilemma: Womanhood and Nursing in Historical Perspective - Susan Reverby Reading 19 SuperNurse? Troubling the Hero Discourse in COVID Times - Rochelle Einboden Reading 20 Becoming a Complementary Health Practitioner: The Construction of Alternative Medical Knowledge - Maayan Roichman Pharmaceuticalization Reading 21 From Lydia Pinkham to Queen Levitra: Direct-to-Consumer Advertising and Medicalisation - Peter Conrad and Valerie Leiter Reading 22 Prescriptions and Proscriptions: Moralising Sleep Medicines - Jonathan Gabe, Catherine M. Coveney, and Simon J. Williams Reading 23 Vaccine Refusal and Pharmaceutical Acquiescence: Parental Control and Ambivalence in Managing Children’s Health - Jennifer A. Reich Financing Medical Care Reading 24 Paying for Health Care - Thomas Bodenheimer and Kevin Grumbach Reading 25 The Origins of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - Jill Quadagno Medicine in Practice Reading 26 The Struggle Between the Voice of Medicine and the Voice of the Lifeworld - Elliot G. Mishler Reading 27 Cultural Brokerage: Creating Linkages Between Voices of Lifeworld and Medicine in Cross-Cultural Clinical Settings - Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo Reading 28 Latina Physicians as “Essential” Workers - Glenda M. Flores Reading 29 “Like Finding a Unicorn”: Healthcare Preferences Among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People in the United States - Alexander J. Martos, Patrick A. Wilson, Allegra R. Gordon, Marguerita Lightfoot, and Ilan H. Meyer Reading 30 Social Death as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Stefan Timmermans Reading 31 Technologies and Health Inequities - Stefan Timmermans and Rebecca Kaufman Reading 32 Being-in-Dialysis: The Experience of the Machine–Body for Home Dialysis Users - Rhonda Shaw Reading 33 “It Just Becomes Much More Complicated”: Genetic Counselors’ Views on Genetics and Prenatal Testing - Susan Markens Part III Contemporary Critical Debates The Relevance of Risk Reading 34 Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health - Deborah Lupton Reading 35 Lay Pharmacovigilance and the Dramatization of Risk: Fluoroquinolone Harm on YouTube - Kristin Kay Barker Reading 36 Risk society online: Zika virus, social media and distrust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - Andrea Laurent-Simpson and Celia C. Lo Reading 37 The Shifting Engines of Medicalization - Peter Conrad Reading 38 The Best Laid Plans?: Women’s Choices, Expectations and Experiences in Childbirth - Claudia Malacrida and Tiffany Boulton Reading 39 C-Section Epidemic - Theresa Morris Part IV Expanding Health and Health Care Illness, Medicine, and the Internet Reading 40 Illness and the Internet: From Private to Public Experience - Peter Conrad, Julia Bandini, and Alexandria Vasquez Reading 41 Collective Self-experimentation in Patient-led Research: How Online Health Communities Foster Innovation - Joanna Kempner and John Bailey Reading 42 “It’s Like Having a Physician in Your Pocket!”: A Critical Analysis of Self-Diagnosis Smartphone Apps - Deborah Lupton and Annemarie Jutel Prevention, Movements, and Social Change Reading 43 COVID-19 as Eco-Pandemic Injustice: Opportunities for Collective and Antiracist Approaches to Environmental Health - Martha Powers, Phil Brown, Grace Poudrier, Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Alissa Cordner, Cole Alder, and Marina Goreau Atlas Reading 44 Politicizing Health Care - John McKnight