Peter Conrad
the médicalisation of society
pp. 615-627
in: Fran Collyer (ed), The Palgrave handbook of social theory in health, illness and medicine, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
Médicalisation has been a much-debated issue since the 1970s, not simply within medical sociology, but within medicine, popular culture and society at large. Peter Conrad has been and remains a key sociological figure in these developments and debates regarding the "médicalisation of society'. This chapter therefore pays fitting tribute to Conrad's valuable sociological contributions to these developments and debates since the mid-1970s. It includes both a necessarily selective sketch of his many writings on these matters, and a critical appraisal of other recent contributions which seek to question, if not go "beyond', médicalisation in order to capture the changing dimensions and dynamics of health and biomedicine in these increasingly technoscientific and biopolitical times.