Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease and the Body in Western Societies

`This is an interesting and ambitious book drawing on a wide range of recent research on the socio-cultural dimensions of medicine in western societies.... the chapters are interesting and well written, summarising a wealth of recent literature.... immensley readable and informative... both in areas which are more or less familiar to me, and in those where I agreed and disagreed with the interpretation.... The book's broad scope fully justifies the contention that it will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of areas' - Medical Sociology News

`This is an excellent book for providing the reader with an instant overview of up-to-date texts in the sociology of health and illness. It will be of immense value in constructing reading lists... The book continues with an account of social theory and the body. It was comforting to learn that this topic is really not as mysterious as I had thought.... I recommend this book as a clearly written and comprehensive text with which to introduce students to the most recent literature concerning the sociology of health and illness' - British Journal of Sociology

`Many people find it difficult to approach the history of medicine from points of view different from those of their own training.... Few libraries can encompass the subject from many different points of view and few students or others have time to study those different viewpoints in depth. So books that do this in a nutshell can be valuable. This concise and readable book... consists largely of an accoutn of research published since 1980.... it explicitly avoids psychoanalytic explanations and detailed discussion of mental illness and aims to increase understanding of `the socio-cultural dimension of medicine, illness and the body at the end of the twentieth century.'... The book is a good introduction to the new and varied perspectives on medicine that have developed during the last thirty years and a useful synthesis of the various points of view. It is written in simple language... it has a bibliography which offers a wide-ranging guide to understanding the subject.... the book is a fine introduction to the complexities of contemporary history of medicine' - Social History of Medicine

`Two chapters discuss how Western men and women conceive the body, and describe in fascinating detail the language we use to talk about illness and disease. Amongst many other themes, the close links between the body and morality, and between illness and the `metaphors of the age' are amply illustrated.... Unlike much in this field, the writing throughout is cool and unpolemical, and her conclusions are reasonable rather than radical. Although the text is enlivened with often pungent quotations and numerous references, clear introductory and concluding sections to each chapter help to ensure that the reader never loses the thread. Good writing on this topic is inevitably thought-provoking, and for anyone thus stimulated to delve deeper this book provides both a balanced overview and a valuable resource' - The Scientific and Medical Network

`The stated aim of this book is to throw light upon everyday experience of illness as something touched by paradox and controversy. Deborah Lupton does this by drawing upon work in the sociology of health and illness, in cultural studies and in the history of medicine in society. Her approach to the field is eclectic, inasmuch as she uses these different perspectives to illuminate how medicine has come to play such an important part in people's lives, and in what she calls the construction of their subjectivities .... To my mind, the two strongest chapters of the book are those in which Lupton draws upon her own experience in the field of cultural studies, particularly as applied to the question of how disease and illness are represented in the media. She gives a very useful account of the role of the media in portraying not just specific diseases, but medicine in general.... This book presents an overview of current work thatt shows why health and the body is currentlyi one of the most vibrant research topics in the broader field of social science' - Health Psychology Update

`The title of this book captures, precisely, its contents. It is a well written undergraduate and graduate text which provides a lucid socio-cultural analysis of medicine, health, illness and disease.... Overall this is a valuable addition to the literature on health and illness and its cultural studies approach ensures that it complements the existing texts in the area. Beyond this, the book reveals just how significant matters of medicine, health and illness are to the functioning and understanding of Western societies. These are not simply specialist or marginal issues or subject matter but are both relective and constitutive of more general ways of living' - Sociology

`This clearly written book is a tour de force. The author succeeds in providing an excellent overview of the way that medicine is experienced, perceived and socially constructed in Western societies.... it whets the appetite... of interest to a wide range of pratitioners. The author has managed to summarize theoretical perspectives and recent research studies clearly and encourages the reader to search for other texts. Certainly this is a book that many readers will find interesting, stimulating and extremely helpful' - Health and Social Care in the Community

`This is an essential book... It is impossible here to do any justice to the scope of Lupton's socio-cultural sweep across the body, medicine, illness and disease without trivialising her achievement.... there are few more insightful, challenging and enlightening discussions of the body in relation to medicine and culture than this.... the author achieves a very rare synthesis between rigorous scholarship, insight and immense readability.... Absolutely indispensable' - Nursing Times