Medicine as culture1994

Medicine as Culture provides a broad overview of the way medicine is experienced, perceived and socially constructed in Western societies. Deborah Lupton 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. At a time of increasing disillusionment with scientific medicine and the mythology of the beneficent, god-like physician, there is also - paradoxically - a growing dependence on biomedicine to provide the answers to social as well as medical problems. This book illuminates why attitudes to medicine are characterized by such strong paradoxes, and why issues of disease, illness and the medical encounter are surrounded by...