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

Deborah Lupton provides a broad overview of the way medicine is experienced, perceived and socially constructed in western societies. She cogently links the different theoretical perspectives informing scholarship and research directed towards understanding the socio-cultural dimensions of medicine, illness and the body at the end of the twentieth century. Key topics examined socio-theoretical and feminist perspectives of medicine; cultural representations of illness and disease; the language and visual imagery of medicine, illness and disease; and the development of the `patient′ and relations of power in the doctor-patient relationship.