SOC 320(S) Health, Illness, and Medicine in Modern Society

This course focuses on how illness and health are constructed in interactions among caregivers, patients, scientists, and the public, as well as through the institutional workings of medicine and health policy in the United States. Employing the conceptual tools of sociology, we will examine how inequalities create disparities in the distribution of health and illness, influence our ideas about etiology, and shape the ways we seek and receive care. We will cover the main approaches of medical sociology and look for the ways that medical thought and technologies affect other areas of social life, and how they are affected in turn. In the latter part of the course, we will focus on two very different case studies in the area of health, illness and medicine-a historical tracing of the discovery and treatment of sickle cell anemia and an ethnography of a clinic specializing in assisted reproductive technologies-to examine these dynamics in depth.
Format: seminar. Requirements: participation in class discussion; four brief written assignments and a fifteen-page research paper.
No prerequisites. Prior exposure to Sociology desirable. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected 22).

Hour: BESSETT