Biomedicine Examined

In: Culture, Illness and Healing 13

Abstract

I: The Social Sciences and Biomedicine -- Relationships between Society, Culture, and Biomedicine: Introduction to the Essays -- II: Mind, Body, Values, and Society -- Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine -- Mind and Body as Metaphors: Hidden Values in Biomedicine -- Psyche, Soma, and Society: The Social Construction of Psychosomatic Disorders -- III: Reproducing Medical Perception and Practice -- Medical Students and the Cadaver in Social and Cultural Context -- Patients, Physicians and Context: Medical Care in the Home -- Discourse, Descriptions and Diagnoses: Reproducing Normal Medicine -- IV: Medicine Evolving, Medicine Adapting -- Space and Time in British General Practice -- Thinking Prevention: Concepts and Constructs in General Practice -- Clinical Science and Clinical Expertise: Changing Boundaries Between Art and Science in Medicine -- V: Medical Construction of life Cycle Processes -- Babyhood: The Social Construction of Infant Care as a Medical Problem in England in the Years Around 1900 -- Menopause as Process or Event: The Creation of Definitions in Biomedicine -- On the Boundary of Life and Death: The Definition of Dying by Medical Residents -- VI: Biomedical Knowledge and Practice Across Cultures -- A Nation at Risk: Interpretations of School Refusal in Japan -- Medical Practice in Response to a Folk Illness: The Treatment of Nervios in Costa Rica -- VII: Constructing the "Ordinary" out of the "Extraordinary" -- Physicians and the Disclosure of Undesirable Information -- The Technological Imperative in Medical Practice: The Social Creation of a "Routine" Treatment -- The Social Construction of a Machine: Ritual, Superstition, Magical Thinking and Other Pragmatic Responses to Running a CT Scanner -- List of Contributors -- Author Index.