The neutrality of medicine and health care professionals in different conflict settings in the Middle East have come under scrutiny in recent human rights reports, and should be seen as part of the broader fallout of the US-led ‘global war on terror.’ The last two decades of US military attacks on health infrastructures in Iraq and the use of polio-vaccination campaigns to track down ‘terrorists’ are acts of war that have further blurred the lines between health care and warfare. The failure of international legal processes and institutions to prevent such assaults or to prosecute those responsible raises questions about the Eurocentric system of checks and balances that shape international humanitarian law and its invocation as a ‘legal’ and ‘moral’ framework.

This course provides an interdisciplinary sociological and anthropological exploration of medical systems, with a special emphasis on Canadian healthcare. By adopting critical social science approaches to explore healthcare services and health, illness and well-being at individual and societal levels, students will gain an in-depth understanding of the social determinants of health, and the role played by medical systems in remedying or even worsening population health disparities and inequalities. The first half of the course explores the evolution and recent history of Canada’s medical systems, with attention paid to the development, policy and operations of Medicare. We will then discuss the contribution of religious healing and complementary and alternative medical systems for Canadians’ sense of wellbeing and their health and healing practices. The second half of the course will introduce and critically evaluate the beliefs that shape the social acceptability and provision of particular medical services, inform health decision-making, access and use, animate provider-patient interactions and treatment processes, and determine outcomes. In the area of medical systems research and theory, special attention will be paid to the social construction of health, illness and medical knowledge, biomedical hegemony and its effects for medical pluralism, and the hierarchies, politics and ethical challenges associated with medical service provision. Then, in order to emphasize the diverse ways that clinical medicine is subjectively understood and experienced, the course will draw on an innovative array of ethnographic studies of health, healing and healthcare systems, and those that prioritize patients’ and providers’ points of view in particular. With regard to patients’ navigation and experience of these same systems, the course will assess how the social determinants of health - such as how they concern economic standing, gender, ethnicity, and race - impact health at individual and societal levels. Efforts will also be made to identify the health inequities, deprivations and disadvantages that are over-distributed among and experienced by First Nations, Inuit and Métis, ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ communities. As importantly, the course will investigate how health beliefs, experiences, practices and even medical ethics are shaped and conveyed by culturally specific illness representations, treatment accounts, and narratives. Throughout the course, attention will be paid to the ways the aforementioned issues intersect with the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article seeks to capture variations and tensions in the relationships between the health–illness–medicine complex and society. It presents several theoretical reconstructions, established theses and arguments are reassessed and criticized, known perspectives are realigned according to a new theorizing narrative, and some new notions are proposed. In the first part, we argue that relations between the medical complex and society are neither formal–abstract nor historically necessary. In the second part, we take the concept of medicalization and the development of medicalization critique as an important example of the difficult coalescence between health and society, but also as an alternative to guide the treatment of these relationships. Returning to the medicalization studies, we suggest a new synthesis, reconceptualizing it as a set of modalities, including medical imperialism. In the third part, we endorse replacing a profession-based approach to medicalization with a knowle...

This article explores the reductive workings of policy that lead to intimate everyday forms of violence within US-based medical administration. Using the framework of folklore of operational banality (“FOOB”), the article examines a geodata-driven way of addressing uncompensated medical care that targets “superusers” of the US health care system. The case scrutinizes the operative truths, procedural rationalities, and absurd reductions performed by this administrative system that sorts people in terms of cost and risk. It shows how such administrative strategies result in further bureaucratized inequities and harm, even as they claim to support life by ontologizing cost efficiency and cost-benefit thinking, accumulating biological data for geosurveillance and biosecurity, and treating risk and vulnerability as the property and responsibility of certain individuals/bodies and spaces rather than as the result of social-environmental problems. A parodic counterfigure appears in the case to amplify criticism of the individualized management of life/risk and the reliance on technocratic methods and biomedical models to define and allocate health care as separate from environmental and justice-oriented concerns. The figure of Health Coach App renders absurd the power relations of health interventions that exclude broader social etiologies of disease and illness and shows that collaborative approaches between environmental and medical humanities are needed to reveal banal administrative violence and to advocate for better policies.

For much of 2009 and early 2010, discussions of health care policies dominated national discourse in the United States. The prolonged and often acrimonious debates brought into sharp focus the enormous, complex, and highly fragmented system that provides health care in the United States. Considerable attention was also devoted to demonstrating the advanced state of this country's medical knowledge, technology, and health services.

This chapter introduces the sociology of health and medicine as a field of study, its origins and contemporary development across the globe. It argues for a role for social theory in the understanding of health and medicine, discussing how social theory performs a variety of purposes and functions, and showcases some of the outstanding achievements in social theory in this field. This leads to a discussion of social theorists and theoretical frameworks, and why some come to prominence and others do not, and why each in turn appears to come ‘into fashion’ and later fall from favour. The chapter concludes with an overview of the structure and contents of the book, explaining the importance of its historical format and broad selection of social theories and theorists.