Medical sociology/Anthropology

Medical sociology/anthropology course provides an introduction to the ways in which medical practice, the medical profession, and medical technology are embedded in society and culture. It aims at providing those social factors that are crucial to our understanding of the social dimensions of health and ill-health. Medical sociology saw how medicine is connected to various socio cultural factors such as gender, social class, race, and administrative cultures. The lecture note will examine the rise of medical sociology as a discipline, the professionalization of medicine, and processes of medicalization and de medicalization. It will look at alternative medical practices and how they differ from and converge with the dominant medical paradigm. Medical sociology/anthropology will read various classic and contemporary texts that speak to the illness experience and the culture of physician, hospitals, and patients and we will discuss various case studies in the social construction of physical and mental illness.