In Hospital Land USA, Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday experiences, culture, and social life. Simonds documents her own Hospital Land adventures and draws on a wide range of U.S. cultural representations ― from memoirs to medical mail, from hospital signs to disaster movies ― in order to urge critical thinking about conventional notions of care, health, embodiment, identity, suffering, and mortality. This book is intended for general readers, medical practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students in courses on medical sociology, medicine, medical ethics, nursing, public health, carework, visual culture, cultural studies, and gerontology.

Product Description: The Medicalization of Psychotherapy: Practicing under the Influence is an ethnographic account of the practice of clinical psychology under the reductionist auspices of biomedicine. Using Peircean semiotic analysis focusing in particular on modes in meaning-making, Sylvia Olney proposes that consciousness should be accorded the same conceptual and value status as “nature” and the human body...read more

Product Description: In recent years medicalization, the process of making something medical, has gained considerable ground and a position in everyday discourse. In this multidisciplinary collection of original essays, the authors expertly consider how issues around medicalization have developed, ways in which it is changing, and the potential shapes it will take in the future...read more

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