Sociology of Health:
Question 1: What is the epidemiological transition? How are the illnesses experienced in a country that has gone through the transition likely to be different from illnesses in countries that have not? How do John McKinlay and Sonja McKinlay (“Medical Measures and the Decline of Mortality”) support their claim that this transition cannot be attributed to medical intervention?” In what way does this serve as a critique of the organization of our current medical system?
Question 2: From the article “Social class, susceptibility and sickness” by S. Leonard Syme and Lisa F. Berkman. Show how the theories of the life course and the stress process apply to the demographic group described by the chapter.
Question 3: Use Foucault’s view of knowledge and power (or surveillance and regulation, if you prefer), explain how medicine and public health can be institutions of social control. Drawing on the reading of “Whose deaths matter? Mortality, advocacy, and attention to disease in the mass media” by Elizabeth M. Armstrong, give an example of how information is manipulated to direct our gaze downstream rather than upstream?
Question 4: How does the conceptualization of illness as “a disruption of embodied identity” add to the model of the “sick role?” Illustrate your argument using article “The Remission Society” by W. Frank.