SOC109 – Illness & Morality: A Look at Medical Sociology

Abstract

Is health a privilege or a right? As a society, how do we come to understand health and its social origins and outcomes? Though medicine has been understood as a social science that dates back to Hippocrates–the Hippocratic Oath–medical sociology is not even 70 years old yet! The climb to intellectual legitimacy and sound research is recent. When it comes to matters of stress, food, doctor-patient interactions, racism and sexism, medical sociologists have a lot to say and a lot to do…come join us as The Social Breakdown begins its journey in everything health!

Keywords

Sociology, medical sociology, health, policy

Resources

1. The Importance of the Study of Medical Sociology (Charles McIntire 1991) 
2. Quick brief on medical sociology of the last 50 years (Rosich and Hankin 2010) 
3. The Anti-Vaccine Generation: How Movement Against Shots Got Its Start (National Geographic 2015) 
4. The sick role by Talcott Parsons in The Social Systems (1951) 
5. A doctor’s “people skills” affects patients’ health (CBS News 2014) 
6. Cultural Competency in Healthcare 
7. Losing culture on the way to competence: the use and misuse of culture in medical education (Gregg & Somnath 2016) 
8. National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health Care (US Department of Health and Human Services 2001) 
9. Emergency department workers face high stress, burnout (Reuters 2016) 
10. Freakonomics’ series on Bad Medicine
    1. Part 1: The Story of 98.6 
    2. Part 2: (Drug) Trials and Tribulations 
    3. Par 3: Death by Diagnosis 
11. Doctors told to dispense with confusing medical jargon (The Guardian 2014) 
12. Global Life Expectancy ranking and data (World Health Organization 2017) 
13. Why Sharing Your Progress Makes You More Likely To Accomplish Your Goals (Fast Company 2015) 
14. The Psychology Behind a Grocery Store’s Layout (Notre Dame College 2013) 
15. Surviving the Sneaky Psychology of Supermarkets (National Geographic 2015)
16. Access to healthy foods worse in poor areas (Reuters 2009) 
17. The cost of organic food (Consumer Reports 2015) 
18. The Word as Scalpel: A History of Medical Sociology (Bloom 2002)
    

    “A doctor can damage a patient as much with a misplaced word as with a slip of the scalpel.”

19. From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology (Annual Review of Sociology 2013) 
20. Healthcare.gov 2018 Open Enrollment