TY - BOOK ID - 6989580 TI - Differences in medicine : unraveling practices, techniques, and bodies AU - Berg, Marc AU - Mol, Annemarie PY - 1998 SN - 0822321742 0822321629 9780822321743 PB - Durham, N.C. Duke University Press DB - UniCat KW - Social medicine KW - Medicine KW - Philosophy KW - 316:61 KW - #SBIB:316.334.3M51 KW - medische praktijk KW - casus (gevalstudie, gevalsstudie, gevallenstudie, praktijkcase) KW - Medische sociologie KW - Organisatie van de gezondheidszorg: modellen van therapeutisch handelen KW - pratique médicale KW - étude de cas KW - Social medicine. KW - Philosophy. KW - 316:61 Medische sociologie KW - Medical care KW - Medical sociology KW - Medicine, Social KW - Public health KW - Public welfare KW - Sociology KW - Medical ethics KW - Medical sociologists KW - Medical logic KW - Social aspects KW - Health Workforce KW - Medicine - Philosophy KW - Sociology of health UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:6989580 AB - Western medicine - especially in contrast with no-Western traditions of medical practice - is widely thought of as a coherent and unified field in which beliefs, definitions, and judgments are shared. Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol debunk this myth with an interdisciplinary and intercultural collection of essays that reveals the significantly varied ways practitioners of 'conventional' Western medicine handle bodies, study test results, configure statistics, and converse with patients. Combining theoretical work with interviews and direct observation of the activities and interactions of doctors, nurses, technicians, and patients, the contributors to this volume provide comparative studies of specific cases. Individual chapters explore topics such as the contested domain of fetal surgery in a California hospital, the construction of gender identity before transsexual surgery in Germany, and differences in the treatment and definition of pain by two clinics in France. 'Differences in Medicine' advances earlier studies on medicine's social diversity and regional variations to expose significant differences in the presumptions and decisions that affect patients' lives, and marks a dramatic development in both the study of medicine and in science studies generally. Revealing the ways in which the bodies and lives of people are constructed as medical objects by practitioners, technologies, and textbooks, this collection calls for and initiates new, more textured theories of the body and investigations in medicine and the practice of science. Marc Berg is a researcher at the School of Health Sciences at Maastricht University. Annemarie Mol is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Twente. ER -