The social medicine reader

The extensively updated and revised third edition of the bestselling 'Social Medicine Reader' provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. Volume 2, 'Differences and Inequalities', explores the fundamental sociocultural, socioeconomic, and racial dimensions that shape health differences and inequalities. These include social and cultural influences on the meanings of health, illness, and disease; social factors in the development of biomedical knowledge and systems of care; and structural explanations for why some social groups experience disproportionate burdens of disease and differences in treatment.

Introduction -- Social and Cultural Contributions to Health, Differences, and Inequalities / Sue E. Estroff, Gail E. Henderson -- Defining and Experiencing Differences. Beyond Medicalisation / Nikolas Rose ; On Being a Cripple / Nancy Mairs ; What You Mourn / Sheila Black ; Physicians' Juries for Defective Babies / Helen Keller ; Blind, Deaf, and Pro-Eugenics : Helen Keller's Advice in Context / Raúl Necochea López ; Tell Me, Tell Me / Irving Kenneth Zola ; Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man / Raymond Luczak ; I Have Diabetes : Am I to Blame? / Rivers Solomon -- Sickness amid Relationships. Twisted Lies : My Journey in an Imperfect Body / Sherri G. Morris ; Raising a Woman / Mary Stainton ; The Sick Wife / Jane Kenyon ; The Loneliness of the Long-Term Care Giver / Carol Levine ; Fathers and Sons / David Mason ; Parents Support Group / Dick Allen -- Social Factors and Inequalities. "Doctors Don't Know Anything" : The Clinical Gaze in Migrant Health / Seth M. Holmes ; Anthropology in the Clinic : The Problem of Cultural Competency and How to Fix It / Arthur Kleinman, Peter Benson ; Beyond Cultural Competence : Applying Humility to Clinical Settings / Linda M. Hunt ;…