This course examines the theory of medicalization by tracing its history and critiquing its underlying assumptions. Students will analyze how concepts of health, illness, and the role of medicine have changed over time, influenced by factors like power, politics, gender, race, and class. The course will compare medicalization to theories of secularization in religion. Through discussions of topics like childbirth, mental illness, and sexuality, students will consider whether the medicalization framework remains useful in different academic fields. The final paper will evaluate medicalization's future relevance through a literature review.
This course examines the theory of medicalization by tracing its history and critiquing its underlying assumptions. Students will analyze how concepts of health, illness, and the role of medicine have changed over time, influenced by factors like power, politics, gender, race, and class. The course will compare medicalization to theories of secularization in religion. Through discussions of topics like childbirth, mental illness, and sexuality, students will consider whether the medicalization framework remains useful in different academic fields. The final paper will evaluate medicalization's future relevance through a literature review.
This course examines the theory of medicalization by tracing its history and critiquing its underlying assumptions. Students will analyze how concepts of health, illness, and the role of medicine have changed over time, influenced by factors like power, politics, gender, race, and class. The course will compare medicalization to theories of secularization in religion. Through discussions of topics like childbirth, mental illness, and sexuality, students will consider whether the medicalization framework remains useful in different academic fields. The final paper will evaluate medicalization's future relevance through a literature review.
HSSC 532 /HIST 534/SOCI 513 _________________________________________________________ Professor Beth Linker Logan Hall, Rm. 365 Office Hours: M 11:00-1:00 Email: linker@sas.upenn.edu Course Description: Many books written today on the history and sociology of twentieth-century medicine invoke the term medicalization. We are told that everything from childbirth and allergies to hyperactivity and hospitals have become dominated by the medical profession and its explanation of health and illness. This course traces the history of the medicalization thesis, from its beginnings with Michel Foucault and Ivan Illich to its latest articulation put forth by sociologist Peter Conrad. Once we are accustomed to the multiple meanings of medicalization, we will put them each under scrutiny, borrowing from literature in the history of religion (a subfield that has grappled with the predominance of the secularization thesis, a theory very much akin to medicalization), as well as from the history of the body. In short, the goal of this course is to read current works in the history of medicine in order to problematize the theory of medicalization. Course Objectives: To understand the multiple meanings of medicalization. To trace the historical beginnings of the medicalization thesis. To appreciate the shared assumptions between medicalization and secularization, and how these assumptions shape the writing of history of medicine today. To understand the role that power, politics, race, gender, and class play in the construction and popularity of the medicalization thesis. Course Assignments and Grading: All papers should be in 12-point font, double-spaced, 1 inch margins. 1. Book Review and In-Class Presentation (see pg. 4individual due dates will be assigned in class). 2. Final Paper: A 5000-6000 word essay that surveys the literature and addresses the following question: Does the Medicalization Thesis (or the theory of medicalization) have a future in your field of study? Due Date: Monday, May 5th. Please place a hard copy of the paper in my office mailbox. Schedule of Readings: Jan. 16 Medicalization before The Thesis Jules Romains, Knock, trans. James Gidney (Great Neck, NY: Barrons Educational Series, 1962): i-vii, 1-69. Michel Foucault, The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984): 273-289. [Review Michel Foucaults, Birth of the Clinic on your own.] Jan. 23 The Making of a Thesis, Part I Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (London : Marion Boyars, 1976). [either the original or the more recent 1999 reprint]
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Bryan S. Turner, From Governmentality to Risk: Some reflections on Foucaults
contribution to medical sociology in Foucault: Health and Medicine, Alan Petersen and Robin Bunton, eds. (London: Routledge, 1997): ix-xxi. Deborah Lupton, Foucault and the medicalisation critique in Foucault: Health and Medicine, Alan Petersen and Robin Bunton, eds. (London: Routledge, 1997): 94-110. Jan. 30 The Making of a Thesis, Part II Irving K. Zola, Medicine as an Institution of Social Control The Sociological Review 20.4 (1972): 487-504. Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), focus on chapters 1-3, 6, and 9-10. David Armstrong, The Rise of Surveillance Medicine Sociology of Health and Illness 17.3 (1995): 393-404. Feb. 6 Early Discontents and Alternatives Rene Fox, The Medicalization and Demedicalization of American Society Daedalus (Winter 1977): 9-22. P.M. Strong, Sociological Imperialism and the Profession of Medicine: A Critical Examination of the Thesis of Medical Imperialism Social Science and Medicine 13A (1979): 199215. Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider, Looking at Levels of Medicalization: A comment on Strongs Critique of the Thesis of Medical Imperialism Social Science and Medicine 14A (1980): 75-79. June Lowenberg and Fred Davis, Beyond medicalisation-demedicalisation: the case of holistic health Sociology of Health and Illness 16.5 (1994): 579-599. Simon Williams and Michael Calnan, The Limits of Medicalization? Social Science and Medicine 42.12 (1996): 1609-1620. Karen Ballard and Mary Ann Elston, Medicalisation: A Multi-dimensional Concept Social Theory and Health 3 (2005): 228-241. Feb. 13 Medicalization and Religion, Part I Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, Secularization: The Orthodox Model in Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, Steve Bruce, ed. (Clarendon Press, 1992): 8-30. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). Thomas Schlich, Medicalization and Secularization: The Jewish Ritual Bath as a Problem of Hygiene (Germany 1820s-1840s) Social History of Medicine 7.3 (1995): 423-442. Feb. 20 Medicalization and Religion, Part II Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Feb. 27 Medicalization and the Natural, Part I Catherine Kohler Riessman, Women and Medicalization: A New Perspective Social Policy (Summer 1983): 3-18. Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 (Cambridge:
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Oxford University Press, 1986).
March 5 Medicalization and the Natural, Part II Rachel Maines, Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Susan E. Bell, Changing Ideas: The Medicalization of Menopause in The Meanings of Menopause: Historical, Medical, and Clinical Perspective, Ruth Formanek, ed. (Hillsdale, N.J.: The Analytic Press, 1990): 43-63. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, The Medicalisation of male Menopause in America, Social History of Medicine 20.2 (2007): 369-388. March 12 NO CLASS: SPRING BREAK March 19 Pregnancy and Mothering: Medicalized or Demedicalized? Janet Golden, Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006). Rima Apple, The Medicalization of Infant Feeding in the United States and New Zealand: Two Countries, One Experience, Journal of Human Lactation 10.1 (1994): 31-37. March 26 Medicalization and Psychiatry Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Michael MacDonald, The Medicalization of Suicide in England: Laymen, Physicians, and Cultural Change, 1500-1870 in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden, eds. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 85103. April 2 Medicalization, Behavior, and Big Pharma Christopher Lane, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Jeremy A. Green, Releasing the Flood Waters: Diuril and the Reshaping of Hypertension, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79.4 (2005): 749-794. April 9 Medicalization, Sex, and Behavior Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000). Bert Hansen, American Physicians Discovery of Homosexuals, 1880-1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society, in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden, eds. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 104-133. Conrad and Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization, chapter 7 April 16 Medicalization and Sleep Kenton Kroker, The Sleep of Others and the Transformation of Sleep Research (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). April 23 Looking Backward, Looking Forward Robert Nye, The Evolution of the Concept of Medicalization in the Late Twentieth Century, Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 39.2 (Spring 2003): 115-129. Peter Conrad, Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
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Schedule of Book Reviews and In-Class Presentations:
Feb. 13 Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (Harper Row, 1970) Feb. 20 T.J.Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (Chicago, 1994). Feb. 27 Richard and Dorothy Wertz, Lying In (Yale, 1989). March 5 Emily S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Theiving (Oxford, 1989). March 19 Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb (Blackwell, 1984). March 26 Allan V. Horowitz, Creating Mental Illness (University of Chicago, 2002). April 2 Jeremy Greene, Prescribing by Numbers (Johns Hopkins, 2007) April 9 Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry (Basic Books, 1981). April 16 Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy (Johns Hopkins, 1999). April 23 Mieka Loe, The Rise of Viagra (NYU Press, 2004).
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