Concepts of Health, Illness and Disease: A Comparative Perspective / Edition 1

by Caroline Currer, Meg Stacey

Overview

Both health care practitioners and health planners are beginning to recognize the importance of differences between lay and professional concepts of health and illness. The editors of this volume, having themselves worked in this field for many years, have selected and brought together writings by distinguished scholars from Britain, France, the United States, Germany and Poland. What impresses most is the range of problems synthesized from a genuinely international and interdisciplinary perspective. No reader can fail to be fascinated by the often peculiar ways in which different societies have tried to cope with the existential questions of health and illness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780907582182
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/03/1986
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Caroline Currer Associate Fellow,Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick Meg Stacey Professor of Sociology, at the University of Warwick

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1. Concepts of Health and Illness and the Division of Labour in Health Care, 2. Concepts and a Model for the Comparison of Medical Systems as Cultural Systems, 3. The Conceptual Determination (Uberformung) of Individual and Collective Experiences of Illness, 4. Illness: From Causes to Meaning, 5. Competing Ideologies of Reproduction: Medical and Maternal Perspective on Pregnancy, 6. Concepts of Health and Illness in a Sepik Society, 7. Internalising and Externalising Medical Belief Systems: An Ethiopian Example, 8. Reactions of Samoan Burn Patients and Families to Severe Burns, 9. Concepts of Mental Well- and Ill-Being: The Case of Pathan Mothers in Britain, 10. The Unprivileged: A Hundred Years of Their Ideas about Health and Illness, 11. 'Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever': Folk Models of Infection in an English Suburban Community, and Their Relation to Medical Treatment, 12. New Research on the Image of Health, 13. Concepts of Illness Causation and Responsibility: Some Preliminary Data from a Sample of Working-Class Mothers, 14. Two Basic Types of Medical Orientation, Conclusion, Bibliography, About the Contributors, Index

Editorial Reviews

...a much needed collection for those approaching the area for the first time.

British Medical Anthropology Society Newsletter

...a successful effort to draw together in one volume the work of several medical sociologists and anthropologists on lay and professional concepts of health and healing.

Contemporary Sociology

...a successful effort to draw together in one volume the work of several medical sociologists and anthropologists on lay and professional concepts of health and healing.” —Contemporary Sociology

“...a much needed collection for those approaching the area for the first time.” —British Medical Anthropology Society Newsletter

From the Publisher