Paul Starr The Social Transformation Of American Medicine Pdf
Paul Starr The Social Transformation Of American Medicine Pdf Template
An embattled Democratic president stakes much of his political capital in an effort to nationalize health insurance early in his tenure. Opponents define the plan as socialized medicine-a charge he strongly denies, but in the process loses control of the political debate.Sound familiar?If you said Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, you would be right.But Paul Starr writes about the same dynamics occurring with former haberdasher Harry S. Truman in his Pulitzer prize-winning history, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry.Truman’s ultimately failed effort at national health insurance is but a small part of this tome, which covers the period from 1760 to the early 1980s, when the book was published.Starr makes several major points in the book. The first is one that social historians of medicine generally accept as a premise: that medical developments must not be considered on their own, but rather within the social, cultural and political contexts in which they occur.Beyond that, though, Starr traces the rise of the doctrine of professionalism within medicine, and how that doctrine has served to inure it to all manner of control to which other industries have been subject.Starr opens the book with a description of the social origins of professional sovereignty.
AbstractIn this important work, sociologist Paul Starr analyzes the relations of the medical profession and society. The book has two separate divisions whose titles reveal their contents. The first part Starr calls 'A Sovereign Profession: The Rise of Medical Authority and the Shaping of the Medical System.' This is essentially medical history, wherein the sociological dimension predominates. A major concern of sociology is the concept of professionalization. This has to do with the delimitation of classes, as they search for identity, undergo organization, strive for sovereignty and authority as well as status, and come into conflict with other groups. As a generalized sociological concern this process has its standard example in medicine, but the overall concept applies to other groups as well.In an introductory chapter, Starr discusses sovereignty, authority, their relation to economic power, and other general sociological concepts as they have specific reference to medicine.
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