bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Medical, economic and population factors in areas of high mortality: the case of Glasgow
Authors: Williams Rory 
Published: August 2010

AbstractRegional inequalities in British mortality, though longstanding, also show important patterns of historical change. The case of Glasgow is particularly striking, since its mortality was converging with England's until the 1820s. It then experienced a surge in the death rate between 1831 and 1871, after which relatively high mortality has persisted to the present day. This patterns is not explain by changes in age structure, particular causes of death, or general urban conditions. It has only limited connections with time lags in the diffusion of sanitary or medical developments. It is associated with industrial development only in its early stage, and is not related to consumption of alcohol. However it is strongly associated with poverty and overcrowding, and probably also with inadequate diet. It is also closely associated with the period of heavy immigration from Ireland and the Highlands, though this is not explicable in terms of Irish or Highland mortality in the place of origin. Hypotheses are presented linking the Irish and Highland immigration with still‐enduring features of regional housing and labour markets, and with two nineteenth‐century lags in the development of sanitary measures and poor relief; and an agenda of research questions is outlined, which relate historical to contemporary regional inequalities.
Social disadvantage and infection in childhood
Authors: Reading Richard 
Published: August 2010

AbstractAlthough the literature on health inequalities in childhood is extensive, relatively little has been written about social differences in infectious disease. This is despite the strong association between poverty and infection noted historically, the continuing importance of infection as a cause of childhood mortality and morbidity, the resurgence of infectious disease as a public health problem and the increasing proportions of children living in poverty. This paper reviews the evidence, mainly from the United Kingdom, which shows that wide inequalities continue to occur in most types of infectious disease in childhood and the consequences stretch into adulthood. Possible reasons for the continuing association of poverty and infection in an age of high standards of hygiene, sanitation, and health care are discussed. Environmental and material factors are likely to have a stronger influence than social differences in behaviour, attitudes and lifestyle, and they can affect susceptibility to infection at the level of individuals, family, and community, and in access to health care. More emphasis needs to be placed on structural and community wide interventions than those directed at changing individual behaviour if a reduction in inequalities in childhood infection is to be achieved.
Doctors on the medical profession
Authors: Lupton Deborah 
Published: August 2010

AbstractOver the past two to three decades there has been vigorous debate in the sociological literature as well as in popular forums concerning the changing social position and status of the medical profession and the extent to which consumerism has entered the doctor‐patient relationship. Few qualitative sociological inquiries, however, have directly sought the views of medical practitioners themselves on these issues. To address this hiatus, this article discusses the findings from an empirical study using semi‐structured indepth interviews with 20 doctors living and working in Sydney about their views on the contemporary status of the medical profession and their experiences of medical practice. Three major aspects are discussed: the extent to which the social position of doctors has changed, the impact of consumerism on medical practice and the qualities of a ‘good’ doctor. The implications of these data for theorising the nature of contemporary medical practice, power and professional status is explored, with particular reference to the insights offered by Foucauldian theory.
The nursing‐medical boundary: a negotiated order?
Authors: Allen Davina 
Published: August 2010

AbstractIn a recent paper in Sociology of Health and Illness, Svensson (1996) makes the case for adopting the negotiated order perspective as the most appropriate theoretical framework for understanding patterns of doctor‐nurse interaction. Analysing interview data with nursing staff from surgical and medical wards in five Swedish hospitals, Svensson identifies key changes in the health care context which he suggests have created ‘negotiation space’ for nurses, leading to the evolution of new working relationships with doctors. In examining the relationship between negotiation processes and the wider structural context, Svensson addresses a theme that has remained an enduring interest of critics and supporters of the negotiated order perspective alike. Drawing on data generated on a surgical and a medical ward in a UK District General Hospital, this paper attempts to make a further contribution to this debate and also to sociological understanding of doctor‐nurse relationships, by analysing some features of hospital work which inhibited face‐to‐face inter‐occupational negotiations but which nevertheless resulted in the modification of the formal division of labour between nursing and medicine. The implications of these findings for the negotiated order perspective are considered, and the question is raised as to what researchers working within this tradition understand by ‘negotiation’ and how it can be studied.
Responding to change: the case of community pharmacy in Great Britain
Authors: Harding Geoffrey , Taylor Kevin 
Published: August 2010

AbstractIn recent years pharmacy has increasingly striven sharply to define and establish its role in the face of technological advance. The pre‐packaging of medicines by the pharmaceutical industry and the use of computers in pharmacies and general practitioners’ surgeries would seem to obviate pharmacists’ traditional activities in the compounding and dispensing of medicines, and challenge their claim to professional status with an associated decline in their social and economic rewards. This paper draws on the literature of the sociology of the professions to analyse the response of this occupational group to threats to its status as a professional primary health care provider. It is argued that pharmacy has the necessary knowledge base to control the symbolic transformation of the pharmacological entity—the drug—into the social object—the medicine, yet has failed to capitalise on this when attempting to define its professional role.
Continuity or discontinuity in the self‐regulation of the Belgian and Dutch medical professions
Authors: Schepers Rita M. J. , Casparie Anton F. 
Published: August 2010

AbstractThis paper looks at the recent developments in the field of medical quality assurance in Belgium and the Netherlands. It takes the viewpoint that there is a strong relationship between regulation and quality assurance on the one hand and the health care environment on the other hand. The reasons for the differences between the two countries, which are conspicuous, will be explored.
Social science and bioethics: the way forward
Authors: De Vries Raymond , Turner Leigh , Orfali Kristina , Bosk Charles 
Published: August 2010

AbstractIt is no surprise that bioethics and sociology developed an adversarial relationship: bioethicists value the clear descriptions of ethically charged situations provided by social scientists, but doubt the ability of those trained in social science to logically derive and discern ‘the good’. For their part, social scientists – experts in observing and collecting data about the way the world is– find bioethicists ignorant of the ways elegantly crafted solutions to ethical problems get altered when incarnated in varied social and cultural settings. This discipline‐centred self‐affirmation can be a satisfying exercise, but it offers nothing to the project of promoting more moral medicine and health care. The articles collected in this volume demonstrate the value of collaboration between social scientists and bioethicists. Focusing on four themes found in recent sociological research in bioethics – ethics of research, the creation of moral boundaries, bioethics and social policy, and the bioethical imagination – this anthology offers practical models of co‐operative work where the strengths of each discipline are brought together to advance our understanding of bioethical issues and to show the way toward just and effective social policy.
The field worker's fields: ethics, ethnography and medical sociology
Authors: Anspach Renée R. , Mizrachi Nissim 
Published: August 2010

AbstractSociologists who do field work in medical settings face an intractable tension between their disciplinary field, which takes a critical perspective toward medicine, and their ethnographic field, which often includes physicians. This paper explores the ethical problems that result from the collision of the two fields. While in the field, ethnographers are forced to choose between sociology and their obligations to host members, as they decide whether to disclose their actual research agendas, whether to ask tough questions or to reveal their concerns, and whether to give advice. The tension persists when field workers leave the field to write, forcing them to choose between competing interpretations and to decide what to reveal or conceal in the interests of confidentiality.Through these moral choices about what to ask, record or present to the reader, ethnographers shape the academic field even as it shapes them.
Ethical boundary‐work in the embryonic stem cell laboratory
Authors: Wainwright Steven P. , Williams Clare , Michael Mike , Farsides Bobbie , Cribb Alan 
Published: August 2010

AbstractMost accounts of the ethics of stem cell research are de‐ contextualised reviews of the ethical and legal literature. In this chapter we present a socially embedded account of some of the ethical implications of stem cell research, from the perspectives of scientists directly involved in this area. Based on an ethnography of two leading embryonic stem cell laboratories in the UK, our data form part of the findings from a larger project mapping the scientific, medical, social and ethical dimensions of innovative stem cell treatment, focusing on the areas of liver cell and pancreatic islet cell transplantation. We explore three key issues: what individual scientists themselves view as ethical sources of human embryos and stem cells; their perceptions of human embryos and stem cells; and how scientists perceive regulatory frameworks in stem cell research. We argue that these dimensions of laboratory practice are all examples of ‘ethical boundary‐work’, which is becoming an integral part of the routine practice and performance of biomedical science. Our work adds to the relatively few sociological studies that explore ethics in clinical settings and to an even smaller body of work that explores scientists’ views on the ethical issues relating to their research.
Gift not commodity? Lay people deliberating social sex selection
Authors: Scully Jackie Leach , Shakespeare Tom , Banks Sarah 
Published: August 2010

AbstractIn this paper we explore lay people's discussions of the controversial topic of social sex selection (SSS). In the UK and many other countries, SSS is prohibited by law. In 2003 the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, after an extensive public consultation, decided against changing the existing legislation. However, this initiative and similar consultation exercises have been criticised on the grounds that public opinion is poorly informed and reasoned. In our study, one of the most consistently expressed ideas was that children should be regarded as ‘a gift’ rather than ‘a commodity’. In contrast, the ‘gift not a commodity’ argument is rarely cited positively in Anglo‐American, secular‐liberal bioethics. These metaphorical statements are condensed articulations of complex but coherent moral intuitions. Where much of the bioethics literature stresses parental autonomy, our lay discussants balanced this principle with ideas about the need to respect the personhood of the potential child, and the characteristics of a good parent. We conclude our analysis by considering the implications for expanding bioethics’ knowledge base and improving the input of lay people in bioethical decision making.
It's money that matters: the financial context of ethical decision‐making in modern biomedicine
Authors: Hedgecoe Adam M. 
Published: August 2010

AbstractWhile the importance of patient autonomy is widely acknowledged and discussed in the bioethics literature, clinicians’ autonomy, their ability to make the best choices about patients’ care free from outside interference, is far less debated. This paper takes one form of external influence over clinical decisions – the cost of drugs – and applies it to a specific case, that of HER2 positive breast cancer and the use of the drug Herceptin in the UK. Drawing on interviews with clinicians, researchers and policymakers, I explore the way financial decisions about Herceptin shape clinicians’ autonomy, and how clinicians as individuals and as professional groups respond to these limits and seek to provide treatment to the highest number of the most deserving patients they can. The point of this paper is not to castigate bioethicists for misguidedly focusing on patient autonomy but point out that clinicians’ autonomy may be so circumscribed by external factors that it may make no sense to speak of their actions as stemming from ethical decisions. At the same time, I suggest that financial constraints create areas at the margin of clinical practice which are deserving of bioethical consideration.
Explaining the emergence of euthanasia law in the Netherlands: how the sociology of law can help the sociology of bioethics
Authors: Weyers Heleen 
Published: August 2010

AbstractThe debate over the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia is most often seen to be the result of three changes in society: individualisation, diminished taboos concerning death and changes in the balance of power in medicine. The fact that these changes occurred in many western countries but led to legalisation in only a few makes this claim problematic. I examine whether socio‐legal propositions, with respect to the emergence of laws which focus on social control, offer a better approach to understanding the development of rules allowing and governing euthanasia. After a short sketch of the history of the Dutch law regulating euthanasia, I discuss these three societal changes in the light of shifts in the social control of medical behaviour that shortens life. I show that the Dutch relaxation of the prohibition of euthanasia goes together with new forms of social control: doctors’ self control is complemented with second‐party control (by patients), professional third‐party control and governmental control. My work calls attention to the fact that bioethics is part of larger systems of social control.
Taking sociology seriously: a new approach to the bioethical problems of infectious disease
Authors: Tausig Mark , Selgelid Michael J. , Subedi Sree , Subedi Janardan 
Published: August 2010

AbstractAfter a history of neglect, bioethicists have recently turned their attention to the topic of infectious disease. In this paper we link bioethicists’ earlier neglect of infectious disease to their under‐appreciation of the extent to which the problem of infectious disease is related to social factors and thus to questions of justice. We argue that a social causation of illness model – well‐known to sociologists of medicine, but incompletely understood by bioethicists – will improve future bioethical analysis of issues related to infectious disease. By emphasising the relationships between social and economic structures of inequality and health, the social causation model provides a richer approach to ethical issues associated with infectious disease than the more commonly used biomedical model.
Biobanks, bioethics and concepts of donated blood in the UK
Authors: Busby Helen 
Published: August 2010

AbstractIn recent years international bioethics bodies have made prominent declarations about the uses of donated tissue and related information in genetic research1. Following the ‘legislative’ mode of bioethics2, these organisations have put forward a number of general principles with a view to promoting the fair and equitable use of donated tissue in such research. However, government policies in this field are shaped differently in different national regimes. In this paper, I use recent debates in the UK about a national genetic ‘biobank’ to illustrate how the shape and texture of policy discussions surrounding the use of donated blood for genetic research have been built upon a prior national consensus that regarded blood as a public good.
Embodiment and ethics: constructing medicine's two bodies
Authors: Armstrong David 
Published: August 2010

AbstractThe first ‘modern’ presentation of medical ethics is generally acknowledged to be Percival's text of 1803. The main theme of this influential pamphlet was the way in which medical practitioners should relate to one another. Two centuries later, clinical practice has very different moral underpinnings: bioethics, which first emerged in the middle of the 20th century, is not concerned with how doctors should interact with each other but with the responsibilities of medical practitioners to their patients. The shift from an ethics based on the relationship between practitioners to one based on the relationship with their patients is viewed as a major advance brought about by a more enlightened society engaging with the consequences of new technologies. But rather than addressing the changing picture of medical ethics in its own terms (which over the last few decades has been from the perspective of bioethics) I examine the history of medical ethics in its close relationship to the form and nature of the medical profession. Further, in a parallel thread I describe contemporary developments in public health and explore the similarities and connections between the two.
Experiencing chronic widespread pain in a family context: giving and receiving practical and emotional support
Authors: Richardson Jane C. , Ong Bie Nio , Sim Julius 
Published: August 2010

AbstractThe impact of pain and chronic illness on the family has been documented, but there is little information about living with chronic widespread pain in the context of the family. This article uses data from a qualitative study of the experience of living with chronic widespread pain to examine the experience and meaning of support for people with this condition in the context of their families. It focuses on the varying, dynamic and reciprocal nature of practical and emotional support in the family. Family members may provide support but are also receivers of support from the person with chronic widespread pain. The factors mediating the provision of this support are also explored, including the nature of the pain and the needs of the person with pain, and the roles, responsibilities and characteristics of other family members.
The linear medical model of disability: mothers of disabled babies resist with counter‐narratives
Authors: Fisher Pamela , Goodley Dan 
Published: August 2010

AbstractThis paper draws on the narratives of parents of disabled babies in order to conceptualise notions of enabling care. This analysis emerges from the Sheffield site of an ESRC research project Parents, Professionals and Disabled Babies: Identifying Enabling Care, which brings together the Universities of Sheffield and Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne. The linear heroic narrative is a dominant theme within Western culture. It is competitive and individualistic and tends to be future‐orientated in that actions conducted in the present are evaluated according to later outcomes. This linear narrative places much store on modernist interventions such as medicine, and tends to uphold professional boundaries and hierarchies. In the lifeworlds of parents, usually mothers, of disabled babies, this narrative can reinforce disempowering interpretations of disability and impairment. On the basis of 25 in‐depth interviews, accompanying stories and ethnographic data, this paper suggests that parents are developing counter‐narratives which, at times, resist linear life models and free parents to enjoy their children as they are. If life is perceived as an open book rather than as a concluding chapter, parents are able to develop stories that are neither linear nor heroic but present and becoming.
‘A politics of what’: the enactment of peritoneal dialysis in indigenous Australians
Authors: McCarthy Alexandra , Martin‐McDonald Kristine 
Published: August 2010

AbstractThis paper explores, on the one hand, the requirements of the technologies and practices that have been developed for a particular type of renal patient and health network in Australia. On the other, we examine the cultural and practical specificities entailed in the performance of these technologies and practices in the Indigenous Australian context. The praxiographic orientation of the actor‐network approach – which has been called ‘the politics of what’ (Mol 2002) – enabled us to understand the difficulties involved in translating renal healthcare networks across cultural contexts in Australia; to understand the dynamic and contested nature of these networks; and to suggest possible strategies that make use of the tensions between these two disparate networks in ways that might ensure better healthcare for Indigenous renal patients.
Partners in health? Exploring resemblance in health between partners in married and cohabiting couples
Authors: Monden Christiaan 
Published: August 2010

AbstractSociological theories on family formation and families and health suggest that married and cohabiting partners will resemble each other in health status, positively or negatively. The family is often seen as a health‐enhancing agent for individuals. However, there are large health differences among families. This study aims to answer the question whether it is the case that the healthy live with the healthy and individuals with poor health have partners who are also in poor health. Moreover, it examines whether resemblance in health is a consequence of partner choice – educational homogamy in particular – behaviour or shared circumstances. Younger and older couples are compared to investigate whether health resemblance increases over the lifecourse.Analyses of a nationally representative sample of almost 12,000 Dutch couples show that partners are indeed significantly alike with regard to several health indicators. Respondents whose partner reports poor health are almost three times more likely to report poor health than respondents whose partner is in good health. There is a strong accumulation of health problems within households. Partner selection with regard to education causes part of the partner resemblance in health. Less support is found for the hypotheses that risk behaviour, mutual influence or the effects of shared circumstances cause similarity between partners’ health status. Surprisingly, partners in older couples, who have been together for a longer time, do not resemble each other significantly more than partners in younger couples. The implications of these findings for sociological theory and social inequalities in health are discussed.