Abstract
Over the last decade, a growing number of social scientists have turned their attention to the study of activism around health issues. Health social movements (HSMs) have pressed the institution of medicine to change in dramatic ways, embracing new modes of healthcare delivery and organization. Health activists have also pushed medicine to evolve by connecting their health concerns to other substantive issues such as social and environmental justice, poverty, and occupational or environmentally induced diseases. HSMs therefore serve as an important bridge, connecting the institution of medicine to other social institutions. In similar fashion, the study of HSMs has motivated medical sociology to develop new tools and theoretical perspectives to understand these alterations in the medical landscape. Medical sociologists stand to learn a great deal about the institution of medicine by observing it as it comes into conflict with patients and activists around issues of health care delivery, science and policy, and regulatory action. This broad sweep of interests must be systematized, which is our project here.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bell S (2000) Experiencing illness in/and narrative. In: Chloe Bird, Peter Conrad, Allen Fremont, Sol Levine, eds., Handbook of Medical Sociology, fifth edition, Prentice-Hall
Brodeur P (1985) Outrageous misconduct: the asbestos industry on trial. Pantheon, New York, NY
Brown P (1984) The right to refuse treatment and the movement for mental health reform. J Health Polit Policy Law 9:291–313
Brown P (2007) Toxic exposures: contested illnesses and the environmental health movement. Columbia University Press, New York
Brown P, Mikkelsen EJ (1990) No safe place: toxic waste, leukemia, and community action. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
Brown P, Zavestoski S, McCormick S, Mandelbaum J, Luebke T, Linder M (2001) A gulf of difference: disputes over gulf war-related illnesses. J Health Soc Behav 42:235–257
Brown P, Zavestoski S, McCormick S, Mayer B, Morello-Frosch R, Gasior R (2004) Embodied health movements: uncharted territory in social movement research. Sociol Health Illn 26:1–31
Brown P, McCormick S, Mayer B, Zavestoski S, Morello-Frosch R, Altman RG, Senier L (2006) “A lab of our own:” environmental causation of breast cancer and challenges to the dominant epidemiological paradigm. Sci Technol Human Values 31(5):499–536
Bullard R (ed) (1994) Confronting environmental racism: voices from the grassroots. South End Press, Boston, MA
Bury M (1982) Chronic illness as biographical disruption. Sociology of Health and Illness 4(2):167–82
Casamayou MH (2001) The politics of breast cancer. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC
Charmaz K (1991) Good days, bad days: the self in chronic illness and time. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
Charmaz K, Olesen V (1997) Ethnographic research in medical sociology. Sociological Methods and Research 25:452–494
Clarke A, Shim J, Mamo L, Fosket J, Fishman J (2003) Biomedicalization: theorizing technoscientific transformation of health, illness, and U.S. biomedicine. Am Sociol Rev 68:161–194
Colborn T, Dumanoski D, Myers JP (1997) Our Stolen Future: Are we thretening our fertility, intelligence and survival? A scientific detective story. Penguin Books, New York
Collins H (1983) An empirical relativist program in the sociology of scientific knowledge. In: Knorr-Cetina K, Mulkay M (eds) Science observed. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA
Conrad P (1987) Wellness in the workplace: Potentials and Pitfalls of Work-Site Health Promotion. Milbank Quarterly 65(2):255–275
Conrad P, Bird C, Fremont A (2000) Handbook of Medical Sociology (5th edition) Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ
Conrad P, Leiter V (2004) Medicalization, Markets and Consumers. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 45:158–176.
Conrad P, ed. (2005) Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical Perspectives (7th edition). Worth Publishing, New York
Corburn J (2005) Street science: community knowledge and environmental health justice. MIT, Cambridge, MA
Davis D (2002) When smoke ran like water: tales of environmental deception and the battle against pollution. Basic Books, New York
Davis D, Axelrod D, Bailey L, Gaynor M, Sasco AJ (1998) Rethinking breast cancer risk and the environment: the case for the precautionary principle. Environ Health Perspect 106(9):523–29
Della Porta D, Diani M (1999) Social movements: an introduction. Blackwell, Malden, MA
Epstein S (1996) Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
Epstein S (2007) Patient groups and health movements. In: Hackett EJ, Amsterdamska O, Lynch M, Wajcman J (eds) The handbook of science and technology studies. MIT, Cambridge, MA, pp 499–539
Figert AE (1996) Women and the ownership of PMS: the structuring of a psychiatric disorder. Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne, NY
Freidson E (1970) Profession of medicine: a study of the sociology of applied knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
Fujimura J (1995) Ecologies of action: recombining genes, molecularizing cancer, and transforming biology. In: Star SL (ed) Ecologies of knowledge: work and politics in science and technology. SUNY Press, Albany, NY
Gøtzsche P, Nielsen M (2007) Review: adequately randomized trials showed that mammography screening did not significantly reduce breast cancer, cancer, or all cause mortality but increased breast surgeries. Evid Based Nurs 10:80
Goldstein M (1999) Alternative health care: medicine, miracle, or mirage? Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA
Harding S (1998) Is science multicultural? Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN
Hess DJ (2002) Technology-oriented social movements and the problem of globalization. Unpublished paper
Klawiter M (2003) Chemicals, cancer, and prevention: the synergy of synthetic social movements. In: Casper M (ed) Synthetic planet: chemical politics and the hazards of modern life. New York, Routledge, pp 155–176
Klawiter M (2005) Breast cancer in two regimes. In: Brown P, Zavestoski S (eds) Social movements in health. Blackwell, London, pp 161–189
Klawiter M (2006) Regulatory shifts, pharmaceutical scripts, and the new consumption junction: configuring high-risk women in an era of chemoprevention. In: Frickel S, Moore K (eds) The new political sociology of science: institutions, networks, and power. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI
Krieger N (1989) Exposure, susceptibility and breast cancer risk: a hypothesis regarding exogenous carcinogens, breast tissue development, and social gradients, including black/white differences, in breast cancer risk. Breast Cancer Res Treat 13:205–223
Krieger N (1994) Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider? Soc Sci Med 39:887–903
Krieger N (2005) Defining and investigating social disparities in cancer: critical issues. Cancer Causes Control 16:5–14
Krimsky S (2000) Hormonal chaos: the scientific and social origins of the environmental endocrine hypothesis. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MA
Krimsky S (2003) Science in the private interest: has the lure of profits corrupted biomedical research? Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD
Lerner B (2001) The breast cancer wars: hope, fear, and the pursuit of a cure in twentieth-century America. Oxford University Press, New York
Light D (1991) Professionalism as a countervailing power. J Health Polit Policy Law 16:499–506
Light DW (2004) Ironies of success: a new history of the American health care system. J Health Soc Behav 45(extra issue):1–24
Loh P, Sugerman-Brozan J (2002) Environmental justice organizing for environmental health: case study on asthma and diesel exhaust in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 584:110–124
Love SM, Lindsey K (1990) Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book. Addison-Wesley, New York
McAdam D (1982) Political process and the development of black insurgency, 1930–1970. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
McCally M, Haines A, Fein O, Addington W, Lawrence RS, Cassel CK, Blankenship E (2007) Poverty and ill health: physicians can, and should, make a difference. In: Brown P (ed) Perspectives in medical sociology, 4th edn. Waveland Press, Prospect heights, IL
McCormick S (Forthcoming) No family history: finding the environmental links to breast cancer. Rowman and Littlefield, New York
McCormick S, Baralt L (2006) Social movement success?: the breast cancer movement. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of Society for the Study of Social Problems. Montreal, Canada.
McCormick S, Brown P, Zavestoski S (2003) The personal is scientific, the scientific is political: the public paradigm of the environmental-breast cancer movement. Sociol Forum 18(4):545–76
McCormick S, Polk R, Brown P, Brody J (2004) Public involvement in breast cancer research: an analysis and prototype. Int J Health Serv 34(4):625–646
McKinlay JB, Arches J (1985) Towards the proletarianization of physicians. Int J Health Serv 15:161–195
Markowitz G, Rosner D (2002) Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. University of California Press, Berkeley
Masi C, Olopade O (2005) Racial and ethnic disparities in breast cancer: a multilevel perspective. Med Clin North Ama 89:753–770
Meyer DS, Whittier N (1994) Social movement spillover. Soc Probl 41:277–298
Minkler M, Wallerstein N (eds) (2003) Community-based participatory research for health. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA
Moore Kelly (1999) Political protest and institutional change: the anti-Vietnam War movement and American science. In: Giugni M, McAdam D, Tilly C (eds) How social movements matter, vol 10. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Moore K (2006) Powered by the people: varieties of participatory science as challenges to scientific authority. In: Frickel S, Moore K (eds) The new political sociology of science: institutions, networks, and power. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI
Morgen S (2002) Into our own hands: the women’s health movement in the United States, 1969–1990. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
Morello-Frosch R (2002) The political economy of environmental discrimination. Environ Plann C 20:477–496
Morello-Frosch R, Zavestoski S, Brown P, McCormick S, Mayer B, Gasior R (2006) Social movements in health: responses to and shapers of a changed medical world. In: Moore K, Frickel S (eds) The new political sociology of science: institutions, networks, and power. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI
Ozonoff D, Boden L (1987) Truth and consequences: health agency responses to environmental health problems. Sci Technol Human Values 12(3–4):70–77
Parsons T (1951) The Social System. Free Press, Glencoe, IL
Physicians Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance (2003) Proposal of the physicians working group for single-payer national health insurance. JAMA 290(6):798–805
Pfohl SJ (1977) The ‘discovery’ of child abuse. Soc Probl 24:310–323
Poletta F, Jasper JM (2001) Collective identity and social movements. Annu Rev Sociol 27:283–305
Polite BN, Olufunmilayo IO (2005) Breast cancer and race: a rising tide does not lift all boats equally. Perspect Biol Med 48:166–175
Quadagno J (2004) Why the United States has no national health insurance: stakeholder mobilization against the welfare state, 1945–1996. J Health Soc Behav 45(extra issue):25-44
Roe D, Pease W, Florini K, Silbergeld E (1997) Toxic ignorance: the continuing absence of basic health testing for top-selling chemicals in the United States. Environmental Defense Fund, New York
Rosner D, Markowitz G (1987) Dying for work: workers’ safety and health in twentieth-century America. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, IN
Ruzek SB (1978) The women’s health movement: feminist alternatives to medical control. Praeger, New York
Ruzek SB, Olesen VL, Clarke AE (eds) (1997) Women’s health: complexities and differences. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH
Scheper-Hughes N, Lock MM (1987) The mindful body: a prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Med Anthropol Q 1(1):6–41
Shapiro J (1993) No pity: people with disabilities forging a new civil rights movement. Random, New York
Sharp LA (2000) The commodification of the body and its parts. Annu Rev Anthropol 29:287–328
Shepard PM, Northridge ME, Prakash S, Stover G (2002) Preface: advancing environmental justice through community-based participatory research. Environ Health Perspect 110(Suppl 2):139–140
Szasz A (1994) Ecopopulism: toxic waste and the movement for environmental justice. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Sze J (2007) Noxious New York: the racial politics of urban health and environmental justice. MIT, Cambridge, MA
Waitzkin H (2000) The second sickness: contradictions of capitalist health care. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD
Waitzkin H (2001) At the front lines of medicine: how the health care system alienates doctors and mistreats patients. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD
Williams G (1984) The genesis of chronic illness: narrative re-construction Sociology of Health and Illness 6:175–200
Writing Group for the Women’s Health Initiative Investigators (2002) Risks and benefits of estrogen plus progestin in healthy postmenopausal women: principal results from the Women’s Health Initiative randomized controlled trial. JAMA 288(3):321–332
Zavestoski S, McCormick S, Brown P (2005) Gender, embodiment and disease: environmental breast cancer activists’ challenge to science, the biomedical model, and policy. Sci Cult 13(4):563–586
Zola IK (1972) Medicine as an institution of social control. Sociol Rev 20:487–504
Acknowledgements
We thank Alison Cohen, Alissa Cordner, Mercedes Lyson, and Ruth Simpson for their comments on the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, P. et al. (2011). Health Social Movements: Advancing Traditional Medical Sociology Concepts. In: Pescosolido, B., Martin, J., McLeod, J., Rogers, A. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7261-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7261-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-7259-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-7261-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)