Sociology of medicine

Sociology of medicine

Book reviews 188 Again. each of the chapters is thorough in its exploration of possible male/female differences for both donor and recipient and ima...

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Book reviews

188

Again. each of the chapters is thorough in its exploration of possible male/female differences for both donor and recipient and imaginative in its application of what is known about gender stereotypes that help to explain the differences uncovered. This is done in no hard-line feminist or anti-feminist manner. but simply with solid sociological solicitude. Cases where stereotypical female behavior aided the female transplant patient (as where her typically self-sacrificing role made donorship less anxiety-provoking than for the male) are presented alongside cases of stereotypical female behavior working against a woman (as where an adolescent transplant recipient, aghast at her Cushingoid appearance. discontinued her medication to regain her looks and died as a result). Throughout Gif of’ Life. the authors use experimental information coupled with interview excerpts. The result is a cogent sociological and psychological portrait of the transplant recipient and donor and of the profession and soctety in which the transplant takes place. For the sociological reader with limited medical background. the authors’ concern to explain fully each medical term and medical event will be agreeable. as must their similar concern to explain the limits and strengths of their sociological methodology be agreeable to the.medical reader. The occasional recommendations for further testing and for practical application will likewise be welcome to both groups. The skillful editorial work of the three main authors results in a book that is careful to summarize previous work. comments upon that work’s failings and successes, and ties it into what Gif o/‘Lifi itself has achieved. The only possible criticism of the volume is one that reflects upon its publishers and not upon its authors. This is the unconscionable number of printer’s errors that remain in the final book (“Peter Brent Brigham Hospital” is apparently a favorite), marring an otherwise line social psychological and medical treatise. CAROL BRINKS GARDNER

Sociology of Medicine (2nd edn), by RODNEY M. McGraw-Hill. New York, 1978. 437 pp. 516.50

COE.

Perhaps as recently as ten years ago, those who taught medical sociology had few texts available for use in undergraduate classes. Recently, however, their textbook problem has undergone a metamorphosis. Now, these teachers face a veritable surfeit of textbooks, whose quality ranges from good to indifferent. Sociology of Medicine by Rodney M. Coe. in its second edition, falls somewhere in the

middle. While it gives adequate coverage to the usual bases. it ‘fails to impart a sense-of the excitement in the field. In the preface to this second edition, Coe tells us that his object is to extend his original text to cover “(r)apid changes in the fields of sociology and medicine in the past decade” (p, vii). He includes new materials on health-maintenance organizations, stress and illness. epidemiological patterns of smoking, national health insurance, and the like, which add about fifty pages to the original “analysis of the field of medicine and medical care from a sociological perspective” (ibid.). If these topics can be grouped as satellites of institutionalized medicine, then absent from the changes Coe includes are topics showing disaffection with it. As examples. missing are self-care, midwives, hospices, the natural food movement. home birth. women’s self-help clinics. and informed consent. Their absence illustrates a more general problem: while his analysis is clearly sociological. Coe is carefully uncritical of the institution of medicine. His treatment of it thus seems myopic, especially in light of the critical views implicit in the recent developments he chooses to ignore. This uncritical posture seems apparent in the organization of the book too. Major divisions are: Disease and the Sick Person, Health Practices and Practitioners: Health Institutions: The Hospital, and The Cost and Organization. While there are some very nice sections in these divisions (e.g. the straightforward treatment of social epidemiology), I want to draw attention to the sort of analytical point lost by the book’s organization. In the second major division are separate chapters on medical history. the professionalization of medicine, and rival practitioners and paraprofessionals. By separating these, the political dimension of medicine as a division of labor created and maintained in specific historical contexts goes unnoticed. Instead, what emerges is an uninspected corroboration of the medical institution’s definition of the situation. All of this is not to say that Sociology oj” Medicine is a bad book. It isn’t, As a secondary source, it contains good work. Its footnotes are exemplary and would serve as a good guide for anyone wanting to know the core of medical sociology. But if there is any contrast between 1970 and 1978 in terms of contemporary issues in medicine for sociologists to ponder, it lies in the abundance of current ways to ask the question: Who is to say who is going to do what to whom in which way, and in which place? And that Coe’s text does not help us to understand. Departmenr of Sociology Drake University Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.A.

KAREN J. PETERSON