Health Sociology Library

Academic Resource Portfolio

Health Sociology and Medical Sociology

30 essential books, from the field’s core textbooks and theoretical classics to the widely read works on inequality, race and global health. Each record gives the bibliographic data, a cover, a short rationale and the full table of contents.

30Books
8Thematic categories
375Contents entries
1961–2025Edition years
Selection criteria. Titles were chosen for (1) adoption on medical sociology syllabi at leading US, UK and Australian universities, (2) canonical status in the field (ASA, Pulitzer, NBCC and similar awards; foundational concepts), and (3) strong, sustained reader reception, including large numbers of Amazon reviews for the trade titles. The latest edition is listed where one exists. Records tagged ≈ contents were compiled from catalog sources and may differ slightly in wording by edition; confirm against the publisher page before citing.

Core Textbooks

The standard survey texts adopted in undergraduate and graduate medical sociology courses across North American, British and Australian universities.

Cover of Medical Sociology 01
Core TextbooksTextbook

Medical Sociology

William C. Cockerham

  • Publisher Routledge
  • Edition 16th ed., 2025
  • ISBN-13 9781032907864

The most comprehensive and longest-running textbook in the field, now in its 16th edition; the default course text in US medical sociology and a reference for faculty. The new edition adds COVID-19, life-expectancy gaps, racism and health, and AI in clinical encounters.

Table of Contents17 entries
  • Part I: Introduction
  • Medical Sociology
  • Social Epidemiology
  • The Social Causes, Impacts, and Responses to COVID-19
  • The Social Demography of Health: Social Class
  • The Social Demography of Health: Gender
  • The Social Demography of Health: Age and Race
  • Part II: Health and Illness
  • Social Stress and Health
  • Health Behavior and Lifestyles
  • Illness Behavior and the Sick Role
  • Part III: Providing Health Care
  • Physician–Patient Interaction
  • Physicians
  • The Physician in a Changing Society
  • Nurses, Physician Assistants, Pharmacists, and Midwives
  • Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)
  • Part IV: Health-Care Delivery Systems
  • Hospitals
  • Health Care Reform and Health Public Policy in the United States
  • Global Health Care
Cover of The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care 02
Core TextbooksTextbook

The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care

A Critical Approach

Rose Weitz

  • Publisher Cengage Learning
  • Edition 8th ed., 2020
  • ISBN-13 9780357045077

The leading critical-perspective textbook in the US; integrates race, class, gender and disability throughout and adds global health and bioethics. Valued for its student-friendly style and award-winning author pedagogy.

Table of Contents13 entries
  • Part I: Social Factors and Illness
  • The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care
  • The Social Sources of Modern Illness
  • The Social Distribution of Illness in the United States
  • Illness and Death in Less Developed Nations
  • Part II: The Meaning and Experience of Illness
  • The Social Meanings of Illness
  • The Experience of Disability, Chronic Pain, and Chronic Illness
  • The Sociology of Mental Illness
  • Part III: Health Care Systems, Settings, and Technologies
  • Health Care in the United States
  • Health Care around the Globe
  • Health Care Settings and Technologies
  • Part IV: Health Care, Health Research, and Bioethics
  • The Profession of Medicine
  • Other Mainstream and Alternative Health Care Providers
  • Issues in Bioethics
Cover of The Sociology of Health and Illness 03
Core TextbooksTextbook

The Sociology of Health and Illness

Sarah Nettleton

  • Publisher Polity Press
  • Edition 4th ed., 2020
  • ISBN-13 9781509512744

The cornerstone British text, taught widely in UK, European and Australian programmes; strong on the body, lay knowledge, risk and health technologies. The 4th edition adds a full chapter on the sociology of mental health.

Table of Contents11 entries
  • Introduction: The Changing Domains of the Sociology of Health and Illness
  • The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge
  • Health Practices, Lay Beliefs, Lifestyles and Risk
  • The Experience of Chronic Illness and Disability
  • Sociology of Mental Health and Illness
  • The Sociology of the Body
  • The Sociology of Innovative Health Technologies
  • The Sociology of Lay–Professional Interactions
  • Social Inequalities and Health Status
  • Health Care Professions and Practitioners in Late Modernism
  • Developments in Health Policy: A New Paradigm for Health Care?
Cover of An Introduction to the Sociology of Health and Illness 04
Core TextbooksTextbook

An Introduction to the Sociology of Health and Illness

Kevin White

  • Publisher SAGE Publications
  • Edition 3rd ed., 2016
  • ISBN-13 9781473982086

A theory-forward introduction organised around the classic thinkers (Parsons, Marx, Foucault, Fleck, feminist theory); a bestseller in health, nursing and sociology schools and ideal for the theory component of a course.

Table of Contents10 entries
  • Introduction
  • The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge
  • The Development of the Sociology of Health
  • Postmodernity, Epidemiology and Neo-Liberalism
  • Materialist Approaches to the Sociology of Health
  • Parsons, American Sociology of Medicine and the Sick Role
  • Foucault and the Sociology of Medical Knowledge
  • Health, Gender and Feminism
  • Race, Ethnicity and Health
  • Conclusion

Readers, Handbooks and Key Concepts

Anthologies and reference works that map the field: the most widely assigned course reader, the ASA-linked Handbook, and concept-by-concept guides.

Cover of The Sociology of Health and Illness 05
Readers, Handbooks and Key ConceptsReader

The Sociology of Health and Illness

Critical Perspectives

Ed. Peter Conrad & Valerie Leiter

  • Publisher SAGE Publications
  • Edition 11th ed., 2023
  • ISBN-13 9781071850824

The most widely adopted anthology in American medical sociology courses for four decades: 44 classic and current readings from McKinlay, Link and Phelan, Williams, Klinenberg, Mishler, Timmermans and others, now including COVID-19.

Table of Contents14 entries
  • Part I: The Social Production of Disease and Meanings of Illness
  • The Social Nature of Disease (McKinlay & McKinlay; Phelan, Link & Tehranifar)
  • Who Gets Sick? The Unequal Social Distribution of Disease (Syme & Berkman; Williams & Mohammed; Snow; Beckfield et al.)
  • Our Sickening Social and Physical Environments (McKinlay; House, Landis & Umberson; Klinenberg)
  • The Social and Cultural Meanings of Illness (Saguy & Gruys; Rubin et al.; Armstrong et al.)
  • The Experience of Illness (Barker; Conrad, The Meaning of Medications)
  • Part II: The Social Organization of Medical Care
  • The Rise and Fall of the Dominance of Medicine (Conrad & Schneider; Wertz & Wertz; McKinlay & Marceau)
  • Other Providers In and Out of Medicine (Reverby; Einboden; Roichman)
  • Pharmaceuticalization (Conrad & Leiter; Gabe, Coveney & Williams; Reich)
  • Financing Medical Care (Bodenheimer & Grumbach; Quadagno)
  • Medicine in Practice (Mishler; Lo; Flores; Martos et al.; Timmermans; Shaw; Markens)
  • Part III: Contemporary Critical Debates
  • The Relevance of Risk (Lupton; Barker; Laurent-Simpson & Lo)
  • Medicalization and Childbirth (Conrad; Malacrida & Boulton; Morris)
  • Part IV: Expanding Health and Health Care
  • Illness, Medicine, and the Internet (Conrad, Bandini & Vasquez; Kempner & Bailey; Lupton & Jutel)
  • Prevention, Movements, and Social Change (Powers, Brown et al.; McKnight)
Cover of Handbook of Medical Sociology 06
Readers, Handbooks and Key ConceptsHandbook

Handbook of Medical Sociology

Ed. Chloe E. Bird, Peter Conrad, Allen M. Fremont & Stefan Timmermans

  • Publisher Vanderbilt University Press
  • Edition 6th ed., 2010
  • ISBN-13 9780826517210

The field's authoritative state-of-the-art volume, revised roughly once a decade since 1963 and closely tied to the ASA Medical Sociology Section; includes the canonical Link and Phelan chapter on fundamental causes.

Table of Contents25 entries
  • Part I: Social Contexts and Health Disparities
  • Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Health Inequalities (Link & Phelan)
  • Social Capital and Health (Kawachi)
  • Why Education Is the Key to Socioeconomic Differentials in Health (Ross & Mirowsky)
  • Understanding Gender and Health (Rieker, Bird & Lang)
  • Social Support, Sex, and Food: Social Networks and Health (Lovasi, Adams & Bearman)
  • Race, Social Contexts, and Health (Takeuchi, Walton & Leung)
  • The Latino Health Paradox (Dubowitz, Bates & Acevedo-Garcia)
  • A Life-Course Approach to the Study of Neighborhoods and Health (Robert, Cagney & Weden)
  • Part II: Health Trajectories and Experiences
  • The Social Construction of Illness: Medicalization and Contested Illness (Barker)
  • The Patient's Experience of Illness (Rier)
  • The Internet and the Experience of Illness (Conrad & Stults)
  • The Sociology of Disability (Albrecht)
  • Death, Dying, and the Right to Die (Seale)
  • Part III: Health-Care Organization, Delivery, and Impact
  • Gender and Health Care (Anspach)
  • Institutional Change and the Organization of Health Care (Mendel & Scott)
  • Health-Care Professions, Markets, and Countervailing Powers (Light)
  • The Sociological Concomitants of the Pharmaceutical Industry and Medications (Abraham)
  • Evidence-Based Medicine: Sociological Explorations (Timmermans)
  • The Sociology of Quality and Safety in Health Care (Zuiderent-Jerak & Berg)
  • Part IV: Crosscutting Issues
  • Religion, Spirituality, Health, and Medicine (Cadge & Fair)
  • Health, Security, and New Biological Threats (Collier & Lakoff)
  • Health Social Movements (Brown et al.)
  • The Application of Biomarker Data to the Study of Social Determinants of Health (Shih, Fernandes & Bird)
  • Gene-Environment Interaction and Medical Sociology (Shostak & Freese)
  • Biotechnology and the Prolongation of Life (Turner)
Cover of Key Concepts in Medical Sociology 07
Readers, Handbooks and Key ConceptsReference

Key Concepts in Medical Sociology ≈ contents

Ed. Lee F. Monaghan & Jonathan Gabe

  • Publisher SAGE Publications
  • Edition 3rd ed., 2022
  • ISBN-13 9781526465887

A concept-by-concept guide (definition, origins, strengths, critique, further reading) written by leading UK, European, Canadian and Australian scholars; the 3rd edition adds pandemics, intersectionality, pharmaceuticalization, digital health and the environment.

Table of Contents13 entries
  • Part 1: Social Structure and Health (selected entries)
  • Sexuality · Ageing and the Lifecourse · Neoliberalism · Social Capital
  • Part 2: Experience of Health and Illness
  • Medicalization · Pharmaceuticalization · Illness and Health Behaviours
  • Stigma · Embodiment · Emotions · Chronic Illness · Disability
  • Illness Narratives · Risk · The Sick Role · Practitioner–Client Relationships
  • Quality of Life · Sleep · Death and Dying
  • Part 3: Health, Knowledge and Practice
  • The Medical Model · Social Constructionism · Lay Knowledge · Medical Tourism
  • Reproduction · Medical Technologies · Digital Health · Geneticization
  • Bioethics · Surveillance and Health Promotion
  • Part 4: Health Work and the Division of Labour
  • Medical Autonomy, Dominance and Decline · Trust in Medicine
  • Professions Allied to Medicine · Nursing and Midwifery as Occupations · Informal Care
  • Part 5: Healthcare Organization and Policy
  • Hospitals and Healthcare Organizations · Privatization · Managerialism · Consumerism
  • Citizenship and Health · Social Movements and Health · Medicines Regulation
  • Evaluation · Malpractice
Cover of Medicine as Culture 08
Readers, Handbooks and Key ConceptsTextbook

Medicine as Culture ≈ contents

Illness, Disease and the Body

Deborah Lupton

  • Publisher SAGE Publications
  • Edition 3rd ed., 2012
  • ISBN-13 9781446208953

The classic sociocultural text on medicine, drawing on sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and history; essential for the body, representation, lay perspectives and power in the medical encounter.

Table of Contents8 entries
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical Perspectives on Medicine and Society
  • The Body in Medicine
  • Representations of Medicine, Illness and the Body
  • The Lay Perspective on Illness and Disease
  • Power Relations and the Medical Encounter
  • Feminisms and Medicine
  • Conclusion

Foundational Classics and Social Theory

The theoretical canon every health sociology syllabus returns to: total institutions, stigma, the clinical gaze and iatrogenesis.

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Foundational Classics and Social TheoryClassic

Asylums

Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates

Erving Goffman

  • Publisher Anchor Books / Doubleday
  • Edition 1961
  • ISBN-13 9780385000161

Introduced the concept of the 'total institution' and the 'moral career' of the patient; one of the most cited works in sociology and a fixture of every medical sociology and mental health syllabus.

Table of Contents5 entries
  • Introduction
  • On the Characteristics of Total Institutions
  • The Moral Career of the Mental Patient
  • The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital
  • The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization: Some Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Tinkering Trades
Cover of Stigma 10
Foundational Classics and Social TheoryClassic

Stigma

Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

Erving Goffman

  • Publisher Touchstone / Simon & Schuster
  • Edition 1986 (orig. 1963)
  • ISBN-13 9780671622442

The founding text of stigma research: discredited versus discreditable identities, passing and covering, information control. Underpins contemporary work on HIV, mental illness, disability and weight stigma.

Table of Contents5 entries
  • Stigma and Social Identity (Preliminary Conceptions; The Own and the Wise; Moral Career)
  • Information Control and Personal Identity (The Discredited and the Discreditable; Visibility; Passing; Covering)
  • Group Alignment and Ego Identity (Ambivalence; In-Group and Out-Group Alignments; The Politics of Identity)
  • The Self and Its Other (Deviations and Norms; The Normal Deviant; Stigma and Reality)
  • Deviations and Deviance
Cover of The Birth of the Clinic 11
Foundational Classics and Social TheoryClassic

The Birth of the Clinic

An Archaeology of Medical Perception

Michel Foucault

  • Publisher Vintage Books
  • Edition 1994 (orig. 1963)
  • ISBN-13 9780679753346

Foucault's account of the 'clinical gaze' and the emergence of modern anatomo-clinical medicine; the theoretical source of the Foucauldian strand in health sociology on power, knowledge and the body.

Table of Contents12 entries
  • Preface
  • Spaces and Classes
  • A Political Consciousness
  • The Free Field
  • The Old Age of the Clinic
  • The Lesson of the Hospitals
  • Signs and Cases
  • Seeing, Knowing
  • Open Up a Few Corpses
  • The Visible Invisible
  • Crisis in Fevers
  • Conclusion
Cover of Limits to Medicine 12
Foundational Classics and Social TheoryClassic

Limits to Medicine

Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health

Ivan Illich

  • Publisher Marion Boyars
  • Edition Reissue, 2000 (orig. 1976)
  • ISBN-13 9780714529936

The radical critique of medicine as a threat to health; its three levels of iatrogenesis (clinical, social, cultural) anticipated the patient safety and overdiagnosis movements by decades.

Table of Contents9 entries
  • Introduction
  • Part I: Clinical Iatrogenesis
  • The Epidemics of Modern Medicine
  • Part II: Social Iatrogenesis
  • The Medicalization of Life
  • Part III: Cultural Iatrogenesis
  • The Killing of Pain
  • The Invention and Elimination of Disease
  • Death Against Death
  • Part IV: The Politics of Health
  • Specific Counterproductivity
  • Political Countermeasures
  • The Recovery of Health

The Medical Profession and Health Care Institutions

Professional dominance, the historical making of the American health care system, and the sociology of medical error and accountability.

Cover of Profession of Medicine 13
The Medical Profession and Health Care InstitutionsClassic

Profession of Medicine

A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge

Eliot Freidson

  • Publisher University of Chicago Press
  • Edition 1988 ed. with new afterword (orig. 1970)
  • ISBN-13 9780226262284

Winner of the ASA Sorokin Award; introduced professional dominance, functional autonomy, the clinical mentality and the social construction of illness. The first sociological analysis of medicine itself as an institution.

Table of Contents18 entries
  • Introduction
  • Part I: The Formal Organization of a Profession
  • The Emergence of Medicine as a Consulting Profession
  • Political Organization and Professional Autonomy
  • The Medical Division of Labor
  • The Formal Characteristics of a Profession
  • Part II: The Organization of Professional Performance
  • Everyday Work Settings of the Professional
  • Patterns of Practice in the Hospital
  • The Test of Autonomy: Professional Self-Regulation
  • The Clinical Mentality
  • Profession as Organization: Formal and Informal
  • Part III: The Social Construction of Illness
  • Illness as Social Deviance
  • Sociological Types of Illness
  • The Professional Construction of Concepts of Illness
  • The Lay Construction of Illness
  • The Social Organization of Illness
  • Part IV: Consulting Professions in a Free Society
  • The Limits of Professional Knowledge
  • The Limits of Professional Autonomy
  • Afterword
Cover of The Social Transformation of American Medicine 14
The Medical Profession and Health Care InstitutionsClassic

The Social Transformation of American Medicine

The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry

Paul Starr

  • Publisher Basic Books
  • Edition Updated ed., 2017 (orig. 1982)
  • ISBN-13 9780465093021

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize and the C. Wright Mills Award; the definitive historical sociology of how physicians gained authority and how hospitals, insurers and the state shaped the US system. The 2017 edition adds a new epilogue.

Table of Contents14 entries
  • Preface
  • Book One: A Sovereign Profession
  • Introduction: The Social Origins of Professional Sovereignty
  • Medicine in a Democratic Culture, 1760–1850
  • The Expansion of the Market
  • The Consolidation of Professional Authority, 1850–1930
  • The Reconstitution of the Hospital
  • The Boundaries of Public Health
  • Escape from the Corporation, 1900–1930
  • Book Two: The Struggle for Medical Care
  • The Mirage of Reform
  • The Triumph of Accommodation
  • The Liberal Years
  • End of a Mandate
  • The Coming of the Corporation
  • Epilogue (2017)
Cover of Forgive and Remember 15
The Medical Profession and Health Care InstitutionsMonograph

Forgive and Remember

Managing Medical Failure

Charles L. Bosk

  • Publisher University of Chicago Press
  • Edition 2nd ed., 2003 (orig. 1979)
  • ISBN-13 9780226066783

The classic ethnography of surgical training and how errors are classified, forgiven and sanctioned; a bridge text between medical sociology and patient safety, listed as a classic by AHRQ PSNet.

Table of Contents9 entries
  • Preface to the Second Edition: A Sociologist Puts on the Hair Shirt
  • Introduction
  • Error, Rank, and Responsibility
  • Routine Surveillance as Social Control
  • The Legitimation of Attending Authority
  • Climbing the Pyramid: Professional Control and Moral Identity
  • Conclusion
  • Appendix: The Field-Worker and the Surgeon
  • Epilogue (2003)

Illness Experience and Narrative

The patient's side of medicine: illness versus disease, chronic illness and the self, and the narrative turn in health sociology.

Cover of The Illness Narratives 16
Illness Experience and NarrativeClassic

The Illness Narratives

Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition

Arthur Kleinman

  • Publisher Basic Books
  • Edition Reissue, 2020 (orig. 1988)
  • ISBN-13 9781541647121

Kleinman's illness/disease/sickness distinction and the explanatory models method are standard in medical sociology, anthropology and medical education; a perennial bestseller reissued in 2020.

Table of Contents16 entries
  • The Meaning of Symptoms and Disorders
  • The Personal and Social Meanings of Illness
  • The Vulnerability of Pain and the Pain of Vulnerability
  • The Pain of Living
  • Chronic Pain: The Frustrations of Desire
  • Neurasthenia: Weakness and Exhaustion in the United States and China
  • Conflicting Explanatory Models in the Care of the Chronically Ill
  • Aspiration and Victory: Coping with Chronic Illness
  • Illness unto Death
  • The Stigma and Shame of Illness
  • The Social Context of Chronicity
  • The Creation of Disease: Factitious Illness
  • Hypochondriasis: The Ironic Disease
  • The Healers: Varieties of Experience in Doctoring
  • A Method for the Care of the Chronically Ill
  • The Challenge of a Meaning-Centered Model for Medical Education and Practice
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Illness Experience and NarrativeClassic

The Wounded Storyteller

Body, Illness, and Ethics

Arthur W. Frank

  • Publisher University of Chicago Press
  • Edition 2nd ed., 2013 (orig. 1995)
  • ISBN-13 9780226004976

Source of the restitution, chaos and quest narrative typology and the 'remission society'; the core text of narrative health sociology and narrative medicine.

Table of Contents10 entries
  • Preface, 2013
  • When Bodies Need Voices
  • The Body's Problems with Illness
  • Illness as a Call for Stories
  • The Restitution Narrative
  • The Chaos Narrative
  • The Quest Narrative
  • Testimony
  • The Wound as Half Opening
  • Afterword
Cover of Good Days, Bad Days 18
Illness Experience and NarrativeMonograph

Good Days, Bad Days

The Self in Chronic Illness and Time

Kathy Charmaz

  • Publisher Rutgers University Press
  • Edition 1991 (pbk. 1993)
  • ISBN-13 9780813519678

Grounded-theory classic on chronic illness, loss of self and the experience of time; based on 115 interviews and a model study for qualitative health research.

Table of Contents11 entries
  • Introduction
  • Part I: Experiencing Chronic Illness
  • Chronic Illness as Interruption
  • Intrusive Illness
  • Immersion in Illness
  • Part II: Problems in Everyday Life
  • Disclosing Illness
  • Living with Chronic Illness
  • Part III: Illness, the Self, and Time
  • Time Perspectives and Time Structures
  • Timemarkers and Turning Points
  • The Self in Time
  • Lessons from the Experience of Illness
  • Epilogue · Methodological Appendix

Medicalization and Mental Health

How human conditions become treatable disorders, the critique of diagnostic expansion, and the sociology of mental health and illness.

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Medicalization and Mental HealthMonograph

The Medicalization of Society

On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders

Peter Conrad

  • Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
  • Edition 2007
  • ISBN-13 9780801885853

The standard reference on medicalization, summing up thirty years of Conrad's work: case studies on andropause, adult ADHD, enhancement and homosexuality, plus the 'shifting engines' thesis (biotechnology, consumers, managed care).

Table of Contents8 entries
  • Part I: Concepts
  • Medicalization: Context, Characteristics, and Changes
  • Part II: Cases
  • Extension: Men and the Medicalization of Andropause, Baldness, and Erectile Dysfunction
  • Expansion: From Hyperactive Children to Adult ADHD
  • Enhancement: Normality and the Temptations of Biomedical Enhancement
  • Continuity: Homosexuality and the Potential for Remedicalization
  • Part III: Consequences
  • Measuring Medicalization: Categories, Numbers, and Treatment
  • The Shifting Engines of Medicalization
  • Medicalization and Its Discontents
Cover of The Loss of Sadness 20
Medicalization and Mental HealthMonograph

The Loss of Sadness

How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder

Allan V. Horwitz & Jerome C. Wakefield

  • Publisher Oxford University Press
  • Edition 2007
  • ISBN-13 9780195313048

Influential sociological critique of symptom-based DSM diagnosis; argues that the rise in 'depression' reflects the pathologisation of normal sadness. Foreword by Robert Spitzer, architect of DSM-III.

Table of Contents12 entries
  • Foreword (Robert L. Spitzer)
  • The Concept of Depression
  • The Anatomy of Normal Sadness
  • Sadness With and Without Cause: Depression from Ancient Times through the Nineteenth Century
  • Depression in the Twentieth Century
  • Depression in the DSM-IV
  • Importing Pathology into the Community
  • The Surveillance of Sadness
  • The DSM and Biological Research about Depression
  • The Rise of Antidepressant Drug Treatments
  • The Failure of the Social Sciences to Distinguish Sadness from Depressive Disorder
  • Conclusion
Cover of A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness 21
Medicalization and Mental HealthTextbook

A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness ≈ contents

Anne Rogers & David Pilgrim

  • Publisher Open University Press / McGraw Hill
  • Edition 6th ed., 2021
  • ISBN-13 9780335248483

Former BMA Medical Book of the Year and the standard UK text in the sociology of mental health for three decades; covers class, gender, ethnicity, professions, services, law and the service-user movement.

Table of Contents10 entries
  • Perspectives on Mental Health and Illness
  • Stigma and Lay Representations of Mental Health Problems
  • Social Class and Mental Health
  • Women and Men
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Age and Mental Health
  • The Mental Health Professions
  • Mental Health Services and Policy
  • Mental Health Law, Risk and Dangerousness
  • Service Users and the Politics of Mental Health

Social Determinants and Health Inequalities

Income inequality, the social gradient, deaths of despair and weathering: the evidence base on how social structure gets under the skin.

Cover of The Spirit Level 22
Social Determinants and Health InequalitiesTrade bestseller

The Spirit Level

Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

  • Publisher Bloomsbury Press
  • Edition US pbk., 2011 (orig. 2009)
  • ISBN-13 9781608193417

International bestseller (23 foreign editions) linking income inequality to health and social problems across rich countries and US states; widely assigned, widely debated, and a starting point for income-inequality-and-health seminars.

Table of Contents16 entries
  • Part One: Material Success, Social Failure
  • The End of an Era
  • Poverty or Inequality?
  • How Inequality Gets Under the Skin
  • Part Two: The Costs of Inequality
  • Community Life and Social Relations
  • Mental Health and Drug Use
  • Physical Health and Life Expectancy
  • Obesity: Wider Income Gaps, Wider Waists
  • Educational Performance
  • Teenage Births: Recycling Deprivation
  • Violence: Gaining Respect
  • Imprisonment and Punishment
  • Social Mobility: Unequal Opportunities
  • Part Three: A Better Society
  • Dysfunctional Societies
  • Our Social Inheritance
  • Equality and Sustainability
  • Building the Future
Cover of The Health Gap 23
Social Determinants and Health InequalitiesTrade bestseller

The Health Gap

The Challenge of an Unequal World

Michael Marmot

  • Publisher Bloomsbury
  • Edition 2015
  • ISBN-13 9781632860781

Marmot (Whitehall studies, WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Marmot Review) sets out the life-course evidence on the social gradient and the policy case for health equity.

Table of Contents12 entries
  • Introduction
  • Organization of Misery
  • Whose Responsibility?
  • Fair Society, Healthy Lives
  • Equity from the Start
  • Education and Empowerment
  • Working to Live
  • Do Not Go Gentle
  • Building Resilient Communities
  • Fair Societies
  • Living Fairly in the World
  • Organization of Hope
Cover of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism 24
Social Determinants and Health InequalitiesTrade bestseller

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Anne Case & Angus Deaton

  • Publisher Princeton University Press
  • Edition Pbk., 2021 (orig. 2020)
  • ISBN-13 9780691217079

New York Times bestseller by a Nobel laureate and his co-author; documents rising mortality from suicide, drugs and alcohol among less-educated Americans and ties it to labour markets and the health care industry.

Table of Contents17 entries
  • Introduction: Death in the Afternoon
  • Part I: Past as Prologue
  • The Calm before the Storm
  • Things Come Apart
  • Deaths of Despair
  • Part II: The Anatomy of the Battlefield
  • The Lives and Deaths of the More (and Less) Educated
  • Black and White Deaths
  • The Health of the Living
  • The Misery and Mystery of Pain
  • Suicide, Drugs, and Alcohol
  • Opioids
  • Part III: What's the Economy Got to Do with It?
  • False Trails: Poverty, Income, and the Great Recession
  • Growing Apart at Work
  • Widening Gaps at Home
  • Part IV: Why Is Capitalism Failing So Many?
  • How American Healthcare Is Undermining Lives
  • Capitalism, Immigrants, Robots, and China
  • Firms, Consumers, and Workers
  • What to Do?
Cover of Weathering 25
Social Determinants and Health InequalitiesTrade bestseller

Weathering

The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

Arline T. Geronimus

  • Publisher Little, Brown Spark
  • Edition 2023
  • ISBN-13 9780316257978

The author of the weathering hypothesis synthesises 30 years of research on how systemic racism and classism accelerate biological ageing; quickly adopted in health disparities and social epidemiology courses.

Table of Contents13 entries
  • Part One: The Erasure, the Erosion, and the Withstanding
  • Is Working Hard and Playing by the Rules the Cure for What Ails Us?
  • Stress and the Human Biological Canvas
  • Distressed Genes and Weathered Cells
  • Mothers and Babies in Jeopardy
  • Collectively Weathering Weathering
  • Killing Us Stealthily: The Weathering Effects of Racialized Social Identity
  • Weathering for Success: Age against the Machine
  • Social Policy and the Assault on Black Family Life
  • Part Two: The Way Forward
  • Think Biopsychosocially: Address the Stealth Inequities That Surround Us
  • Think Holistically: Transcend Departments, Compartments, and Determinants
  • Do Not Erase Oppressed Stakeholders: Do Nothing about Us without Us
  • Reorient Public Health Science and Practice to Address Working- and Reproductive-Age Adults
  • Recognize All Our Fates Are Linked

Race, Culture and Global Health

Cross-cultural care, research ethics, structural violence and migrant health; the most widely read narrative works on medical sociology syllabi.

Cover of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down 26
Race, Culture and Global HealthTrade bestseller

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

Anne Fadiman

  • Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Edition Pbk. with new afterword, 2012 (orig. 1997)
  • ISBN-13 9780374533403

National Book Critics Circle Award winner and one of the most assigned books in medical schools and medical sociology courses; the standard case for cultural competence, explanatory models and miscommunication in care.

Table of Contents21 entries
  • Preface
  • Birth
  • Fish Soup
  • The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
  • Do Doctors Eat Brains?
  • Take As Directed
  • High-Velocity Transcortical Lead Therapy
  • Government Property
  • Foua and Nao Kao
  • A Little Medicine and a Little Neeb
  • War
  • The Big One
  • Flight
  • Code X
  • The Melting Pot
  • Gold and Dross
  • Why Did They Pick Merced?
  • The Eight Questions
  • The Life or the Soul
  • The Sacrifice
  • Afterword (2012)
Cover of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 27
Race, Culture and Global HealthTrade bestseller

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ≈ contents

Rebecca Skloot

  • Publisher Broadway Books / Crown
  • Edition Pbk., 2011 (orig. 2010)
  • ISBN-13 9781400052189

A #1 New York Times bestseller and among the most-reviewed nonfiction books on Amazon; widely used in courses on research ethics, informed consent, race and medicine, and tissue ownership.

Table of Contents8 entries
  • Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph · Deborah's Voice
  • Part One: Life (chapters 1–11)
  • The Exam · Clover · Diagnosis and Treatment · The Birth of HeLa
  • “Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside” · “Lady's on the Phone” · The Death and Life of Cell Culture
  • “A Miserable Specimen” · Turner Station · The Other Side of the Tracks · “The Devil of Pain Itself”
  • Part Two: Death (chapters 12–22)
  • The Storm · The HeLa Factory · Helen Lane · “Too Young to Remember”
  • The HeLa Bomb · Night Doctors · “The Fame She So Richly Deserves”
  • Part Three: Immortality (chapters 23–38)
  • “It's Alive” · “Least They Can Do” · “Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?” · Breach of Privacy
  • Afterword
Cover of Medical Apartheid 28
Race, Culture and Global HealthMonograph

Medical Apartheid

The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Harriet A. Washington

  • Publisher Harlem Moon / Doubleday
  • Edition Pbk., 2008 (orig. 2006)
  • ISBN-13 9780767915472

National Book Critics Circle Award winner; the first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans and the roots of medical mistrust. Core reading for race and health and research ethics.

Table of Contents17 entries
  • Introduction: The American Janus of Medicine and Race
  • Part I: A Troubling Tradition
  • Southern Discomfort: Medical Exploitation on the Plantation
  • Profitable Wonders: Antebellum Medical Experimentation with Slaves and Freedmen
  • Circus Africanus: The Popular Display of Black Bodies
  • The Surgical Theater: Black Bodies in the Antebellum Clinic
  • The Restless Dead: Anatomical Dissection and Display
  • Diagnosis Freedom: The Civil War, Emancipation, and Fin de Siècle Medical Research
  • “A Notoriously Syphilis-Soaked Race”: What Really Happened at Tuskegee?
  • Part II: The Usual Subjects
  • The Black Stork: The Eugenic Control of African American Reproduction
  • Nuclear Winter: Radiation Experiments on African Americans
  • Caged Subjects: Research on Black Prisoners
  • The Children's Crusade: Research Targets Young African Americans
  • Part III: Race, Technology, and Medicine
  • Genetic Perdition: The Rise of Molecular Bias
  • Infection and Inequity: Illness as Crime
  • The Machine Age: African American Martyrs to Surgical Technology
  • Aberrant Wars: American Bioterrorism Targets Blacks
  • Epilogue: Medical Research with Blacks Today
Cover of Pathologies of Power 29
Race, Culture and Global HealthMonograph

Pathologies of Power

Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

Paul Farmer (foreword by Amartya Sen)

  • Publisher University of California Press
  • Edition Pbk. with new preface, 2004 (orig. 2003)
  • ISBN-13 9780520243262

The key text on structural violence and health from Haiti, Chiapas and Russian prisons; central to global health, medical anthropology and the political economy of health in sociology.

Table of Contents11 entries
  • Foreword (Amartya Sen) · Introduction
  • Part I: Bearing Witness
  • On Suffering and Structural Violence: Social and Economic Rights in the Global Era
  • Pestilence and Restraint: Guantánamo, AIDS, and the Logic of Quarantine
  • Lessons from Chiapas
  • A Plague on All Our Houses? Resurgent Tuberculosis inside Russia's Prisons
  • Part II: One Physician's Perspective on Human Rights
  • Health, Healing, and Social Justice: Insights from Liberation Theology
  • Listening for Prophetic Voices: A Critique of Market-Based Medicine
  • Cruel and Unusual: Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis as Punishment
  • New Malaise: Medical Ethics and Social Rights in the Global Era
  • Rethinking Health and Human Rights: Time for a Paradigm Shift
  • Afterword
Cover of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies 30
Race, Culture and Global HealthMonograph

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Seth M. Holmes (foreword by Philippe Bourgois)

  • Publisher University of California Press
  • Edition Updated ed., 2023 (orig. 2013)
  • ISBN-13 9780520398634

Margaret Mead Award-winning ethnography of Triqui migrant farmworkers; shows how ethnic and citizenship hierarchies become embodied as illness and are naturalised in clinical care. A frequently assigned contemporary ethnography.

Table of Contents10 entries
  • Foreword (Philippe Bourgois) · Preface to the Updated Edition
  • Introduction: “Worth Risking Your Life?”
  • “We Are Field Workers”: Embodied Anthropology of Migration
  • Segregation on the Farm: Ethnic Hierarchies at Work
  • “How the Poor Suffer”: Embodying the Violence Continuum
  • “Doctors Don't Know Anything”: The Clinical Gaze in Migrant Health
  • “Because They're Lower to the Ground”: Naturalizing Social Suffering
  • Conclusion: Change, Pragmatic Solidarity, and Beyond
  • Epilogue: We Provide Food for Your Table (with Jorge Ramirez-Lopez)
  • Appendix: On Ethnographic Writing and Contextual Knowledge
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Health Sociology · Book Portfolio
Compiled by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Nurullah Kurutkan · Düzce University, Faculty of Business, Department of Health Management · healthtopic.org
Bibliographic data and contents compiled from publisher pages (Routledge, SAGE, Polity, Cengage, University of Chicago Press, University of California Press, Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press) and library catalogs.

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