Biomedicine Examined

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. The Social Sciences and Biomedicine

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Introduction

      • Margaret Lock

      Pages 3-10

   3. Relationships between Society, Culture, and Biomedicine: An Introduction to the Essays

      • Margaret Lock, Deborah R. Gordon

      Pages 11-16

3. Mind, Body, Values, and Society

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 17-17

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   2. Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine

      • Deborah R. Gordon

      Pages 19-56

   3. Mind and Body as Metaphors: Hidden Values in Biomedicine

      • Laurence J. Kirmayer

      Pages 57-93

   4. Psyche, Soma, and Society: The Social Construction of Psychosomatic Disorders

      • Cecil G. Helman

      Pages 95-122

4. Reproducing Medical Perception and Practice

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 123-123

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   2. Medical Students and the Cadaver in Social and Cultural Context

      • Joseph W. Lella, Dorothy Pawluch

      Pages 125-153

   3. Patients, Physicians and Context: Medical Care in the Home

      • Andrea Sankar

      Pages 155-178

   4. Discourse, Descriptions and Diagnoses: Reproducing Normal Medicine

      • Paul Atkinson

      Pages 179-204

5. Medicine Evolving, Medicine Adapting

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 205-205

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   2. Space and Time in British General Practice

      • David Armstrong

      Pages 207-225

   3. Thinking Prevention: Concepts and Constructs in General Practice

      • Anthony Williams, Mary Boulton

      Pages 227-255

   4. Clinical Science and Clinical Expertise: Changing Boundaries between Art and Science in Medicine

      • Deborah R. Gordon

      Pages 257-295

6. Medical Construction of Life Cycle Processes

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 297-297

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   2. Babyhood: The Social Construction of Infant Care as a Medical Problem in England in the Years Around 1900

      • Peter W. G. Wright

      Pages 299-329

   3. Menopause as Process or Event: The Creation of Definitions in Biomedicine

      • Patricia Kaufert

      Pages 331-349

   4. On the Boundary of Life and Death: The Definition of Dying by Medical Residents

      • Jessica H. Muller, Barbara A. Koenig

      Pages 351-374

The culture of contemporary medicine is the object of investigation in this book; the meanings and values implicit in biomedical knowledge and practice and the social processes through which they are produced are examined through the use of specific case studies. The essays provide examples of how various facets of 20th century medicine, including edu­ cation, research, the creation of medical knowledge, the development and application of technology, and day to day medical practice, are per­ vaded by a value system characteristic of an industrial-capitalistic view of the world in which the idea that science represents an objective and value free body of knowledge is dominant. The authors of the essays are sociologists and anthropologists (in almost equal numbers); also included are papers by a social historian and by three physicians all of whom have steeped themselves in the social sci­ ences and humanities. This co-operative endeavor, which has necessi­ tated the breaking down of disciplinary barriers to some extent, is per­ haps indicative of a larger movement in the social sciences, one in which there is a searching for a middle ground between grand theory and attempts at universal explanations on the one hand, and the context-spe­ cific empiricism and relativistic accounts characteristic of many historical and anthropological analyses on the other.

• Nation
• biomedicine
• diagnosis
• medical practice
• prevention

• Departments of Humanities and Social Studies in Medicine and Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

  Margaret Lock

• Program in Medical Anthropology, University of California, San Francisco, USA

  Deborah Gordon

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