What moral and legal issues are involved in the physician-patient relationship? What is bioethics? What social and environmental factors are involved in health and disease? An interdisciplinary workshop of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities in May 1980 considered these issues, as well as health care delivery, the history of public health in Canada, conflicting "health cultures," and responsibilities of professionals on the health care team. Participating in the conference were prominent scholars and professionals in social edicine, community health, nursing, law, medical research, medical education, and various academic disciplines. They included Dr. Thomas McKeown, Dr. David Roy, Professor Hazel Weidman, Professor Benjamin Freedman, Dr. Anthony Lam, and Dr. Robert Hatfield.

The great British reformer Jeremy Bentham wrote that 'the art of legislation is but the art of healing practised upon a large scale'. He added that 'It is the common endeavour of both to relieve men from the miseries of life. But the physician relieves them one by one: the legislator by millions at a time'. Bentham raised the question of the interplay of medicine with politics. It forms an important topic with powerful contemporary overtones. This volume, containing eleven essays plus a lengthy introduction, seeks to explore it historically. It takes a long perspective, covering the last two centuries and also an international viewpoint, examining Britain in detail but also containing contributions dealing with the United States, Germany, Russia and France.

"Many of the goals of South Africa’s new democracy depend on the production of professionals who have not only the knowledge and skills to make our country globally competitive, but also a commitment to working and living here. Despite numerous reforms, the South African health system, ten years into democracy, remains divided: first world private care that ranks with middle income countries internationally at the one end, and at the other extreme, in the rural public sector in particular, conditions that are superior only to the poorest of African countries. Much work has been done to change medical school curricula in line with the primary health-care focus of government policy, and international trends towards problem-based learning. The student profile in medical schools is now not only more representative of the demographics of South Africa, but also reveals a significant increase in female students. Whether these students will stay in the country after graduating, and serve where they are needed most, remains to be seen."--Publisher's website.

First published in 1992, this book explores how we come to hold our present attitudes towards health, sickness and the medical profession. Roy Porter argues that the outlook of the age of Enlightenment was crucially important in the creation of modern thinking about disease, doctors and society. To illustrate this viewpoint, he focuses on Thomas Beddoes, a prominent doctor of the eighteenth century and examines his challenging, pugnacious, radical and often amusing views on a wide range of issues concerning the place of illness and medicine in society. Many modern debates in medicine continue to echo the topics which Beddoes himself discussed in his ever-trenchant and provocative manner. This book will be of interest to those studying the history of medicine, social history and the Enlightenment.

This collection offers empirical studies and theoretical essays about human communication in everyday life. The writings come from many of the world's leading researchers and cut across academic boundaries, engaging scholars and teachers from such disciplines as communication, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and education. Chapters emphasize empirical, qualitative studies of people's everyday uses of talk-in-interaction, and they feature work in such areas as sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography. The volume is dedicated to and highlights themes in the work of the late Robert Hopper, an outstanding scholar in communication who pioneered research in Language and Social Interaction (LSI). The contributors examine various features of human interaction (such as laughter, vocal repetition, and hand gestures) occurring naturally within a variety of settings (at a dinner table, a doctor's office, an automotive repair shop, and so forth), whereby interlocutors accomplish aspects of their interpersonal or institutional lives (resolve a disagreement, report bad medical news, negotiate a raise, and more), all of which may relate to larger social issues (including police brutality, human spirituality, death, and optimism). The chapters in this anthology show that social life is largely a communicative accomplishment and that people constitute the social realities experienced every day through small and subtle ways of communicating, carefully orchestrated but commonly taken for granted. In showcasing the diversity of contemporary LSI research, this volume is appropriate for scholars and graduate students in language and social interaction, communication, sociology, research methods, qualitative research methods, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistics, and related areas.

The reception of Michel Foucault's work in the social sciences and humanities has been phenomenal. Foucault's concepts and methodology have encouraged new approaches to old problems and opened up new lines of enquiry. This book assesses the contribution of Foucault's work to research and thinking in the area of health and medicine, and shows how key researchers in the sociology of health and illness are currently engaging with his ideas. Foucault, Health and Medicine explores such important issues as: Foucault's concept of 'discourse', the critique of the 'medicalization' thesis, the analysis of the body and the self, Foucault's concept of 'bio-power' in the analysis of health education, the implications of Foucault's ideas for feminist research on embodiment and gendered subjectivities, the application of Foucault's notion of governmentality to the analysis of health policy, health promotion, and the consumption of health. Foucault, Health and Medicine offers a `state of the art' overview of Foucaldian scholarship in the area of health and medicine. It will provide a key reference for both students and researchers working in the areas of medical sociology, health policy, health promotion and feminist studies.

More than 150 key social issues confronting the United States today are covered in this eight-volume set: from abortion and adoption to capital punishment and corporate crime; from obesity and organized crime to sweatshops and xenophobia.

How can psychology contribute to our understanding of Hispanics in the United States? Edited by Amado M. Padilla, Hispanic Psychology offers students, researchers, and practitioners the most contemporary and complete view of psychological writings available today. The topics tackled by a team of social scientists include adaptation to a new culture in the United States, the role of the family in acculturation, ethnic identification for Hispanics, health and mental health service and research needs of Hispanics, and changing gender roles in Hispanic culture. This volume examines such complex subjects as Chicano male gang members, homeless female AIDS victims, and educational resiliency of students with authority and perceptivity. This book brings together diverse psychological issues that will spark an interest in anyone wishing to have a current perspective on the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. "Libraries serving graduate students in the areas of psychology, education, child development, or Latino studies should find this book helpful." --Choice "The growing presence and relevance of ethnic and cultural issues in many mental health disciplines has a cogent demonstration in this handsome volume. The strength of this volume is in its well-conceived and realized research studies. Indeed, the "new scholarship" of conceptual models, measurement instruments, and interpretive approaches, drawing heavily on the social context in which Hispanics live, gives this book a prominent place among its peers. This volume will become a landmark in the task of defining the realities and the fate of Hispanics in the United States of the twenty-first century." --Renato D. Alacrón in Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review