Gender perspectives on health and medicine: key themes

Includes bibliographical references and index. --- Review, June/July 2005: This book is about gender, health and medicine broadly defined. As seen throughout the text, medicine and health are social constructions, and gender is an embedded part of them. The different authors reveal that embedded with gender in the institution of medicine are race, class, and sexuality. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a critique of exclusively biomedical approaches to personal and public health and calls for more sociological input and qualitative research to help understand aspects of health and illness. Recurring themes include the medicalization of personal and social problems, the commodification of healthcare, and questions of agency, responsibility and control. It contains such timely topics as somatic distress among women with breast cancer, drug company funding of research on women's sexual problems, and racial and ethnic health disparities.