The rise of Western scientific medicine fully established the medical sector of the U.S. political economy by the end of the Second World War, the first "social transformation of American medicine." Then, in an ongoing process called medicalization, the jurisdiction of medicine began expanding, redefining certain areas once deemed moral, social, or legal problems (such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and obesity) as medical problems. The editors of this important collection argue that since the mid-1980s, dramatic, and especially technoscientific, changes in the constitution, organization, and practices of contemporary biomedicine have coalesced into biomedicalization, the second major transformation of American medicine. This volume offers in-depth analyses and case studies along with the groundbreaking essay in which the editors first elaborated their theory of biomedicalization.
Contributors. Natalie Boero, Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Kelly Joyce, Jonathan Kahn, Laura Mamo, Jackie Orr, Elianne Riska, Janet K. Shim, Sara Shostak
Industry Reviews
"Biomedicalization by Adele E. Clarke and colleagues is an ambitious book that fleshes out the complexities of technoscientific biomedicine. It showcases stellar case studies that concretize and complicate existing understandings of biomedicalization and its impact on society and life itself... There is something for everyone in this book. It is a useful background text and overview of the current knowledge of the best way for the patient and the provider to communicate with each other in the context of health and illness. The book has an inclusive goal to communicate evidence-based good practice with providers, patients, researches and caregivers and is to be recommended." - Anne Arber, Sociology of Health & Illness, Vol. 34 No. 1, 2012 "In this excellent book, Adele E. Clarke and her colleagues have meticulously mapped out the multiple dimensions of the phenomenon that they term 'biomedicalization', tracing the links between such apparently distinct phenomena as the increasing use of pharmaceutical drugs for prevention and enhancement, the new biomedical focus on risk and risk prevention, the commodification of medicine, the growing global bioeconomy, and the increased salience of the active and responsible patient. In demonstrating the socio-political, technical and epistemic interconnections between these developments, and through case studies of issues from reproduction to psychiatry, and from body imaging to biomarkers, this book makes a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the contemporary technoscientific transformation of American medicine, and one that will inform and inspire future research." Nikolas Rose, Martin White Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science "At a time when biocapital, biopower, biotechnology, and biomedicine are more entangled than ever, this volume offers both rich theoretical and case-study grounding. The little preface 'bio-' seems to be about a kind of world-making equation for Bio[X] raised to the nth power, where citizens of the U.S., at least, find themselves with the obligation of health without the right to health, and with the technical means to extraordinary prowess in relation to the biomedical body without the financial means for many to pay for much humbler organic well being. This packed volume pulls astutely on the threads of many bio-knots to track questions of health and medicine in economic, cultural, and epistemological weaves. These essays are crucial for thinking about how difference and health--and differences in health--in the U.S. do and do not prepare one to travel responsibly trans-nationally." Donna Haraway, author of When Species Meet "These captivating essays bring the study of health and medicine to a new level by firmly linking medical sociology to the latest work on science, technology, gender, sexuality, race, and the body. Across the wide range of diseases and issues taken up in this volume, biomedicine emerges as a crucial domain where identities and differences are generated, inequalities are challenged or reinforced, risks and rewards are juxtaposed, and dreams of human perfectibility are constantly dangled before us."--Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research
