Aspects of illness

With critical observations on past approaches to this issue and the proposal of alternative lines of inquiry, this book is concerned with the attempts made by sociologists (and to a lesser extent, doctors) to account for patterns of social conduct that are observably associated with periods of illness. The author argues that medical sociologists have confused the proper realms of biological and sociological inquiry, and that it is this confusion that lies at the heart of the paucity of genuinely informative work in this field. The first chapter examines some of the influential explanations of the social consequences of illness that medical sociologists have put forward. The author analyzes representative selections from the body of literature on illness behaviour and on attempts to formulate accounts of illness within that tradition. This is followed in Chapter 2 by a look at previous attempts to break with this tradition and to develop accounts of illness as social action rather than as mere behaviour. In Chapter 3, Robert Dingwall attempts to formulate some more positive proposals. He reviews a number of suggestions concerning more adequate conceptualizations of illness. He then seeks to develop from them an account of illness based on the study of every-day life. These suggestions are illustrated in Chapter 5 by a re-working of empirical accounts of psychoactive drugs, poliomyelitis, myocardial infarction and childbirth. In the final chapter he sets out a methodological programme by which the questions raised in the book might be further investigated.