THE SOCIOLOGY OF MEDICINE

This course uses "the sociological imagination" to explore the role and meaning of medicine in modern U.S. society. What does it mean to dwell in "the night-side of life"? How do we define health and illness, and how does the structure of society shape who gets sick, who gets care, who lives, who dies? How is looking at ethics in medicine sociologically different from looking at ethics in medicine philosophically? Clinically? We will discuss some of the basic tenets of the sociology of medicine--what it means to be sick, the social as well as biological dimensions of disease, how medicine functions as a form of social control--and examine from a sociological perspective the ethical dilemmas in medicine that crowd today's headlines. We will explore not only what is "moral or immoral, right or wrong," but how our society constructs problems and settles on solutions. Our readings will include short stories, scholarly treatises from the sociological literature and the bioethics literature, historical accounts and primary documents, articles from medical journals, personal reminiscences, and articles from the popular press. We will use medicine as a window onto our social world (America at the dawn of the 21st century) and the human condition. We will learn to see that ethical dilemmas in medicine are socially embedded, socially determined, and socially resolved.