Abstract
Medicalization has become a central analytical theme in medical sociology, a topic in medical sociology courses and the subject of hundreds if not thousands of articles (Conrad P (2007) The medicalization of society: on the transformation of human condition into treatable disorders. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore; Ballard K, Elston MA (2005) Medicalisation: a multi-dimensional concept. Soc Theory Heal 3:228–241; Clarke et al. 2010). Other scholars, including historians (Nye RA (2003) The evolution of the concept of medicalization in the late twentieth century. J Hist Behavioral Sci 39:115–129), anthropologists (Lock M (2001, Press 2006) Medicalization: cultural concerns. In: Smelser N, Baltes P (eds) International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences. Elsevier, New York), medical and public health researchers (Metzl JM, Herzig RM (2007) Medicalisation in the 21st century: an introduction. Lancet 369:697–698; Maloney 2011; Lantz et al. (2007) Health policy approaches to population health: the limits of medicalization. Health Affairs 26:1253–1257), economists (Thorpe KE, Philwaw M (2012) The medicalization of chronic disease and costs. Ann Rev Public Heal 23:409–423), bioethicists (Parens E (2011) On good and bad forms of medicalization. Bioethics doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01885.x), and even literary scholars (Lane C (2007) Shyness: how normal behavior became a sickness. Yale University Press, New Haven) have also examined medicalization. Medicalization has been the subject of newspaper and magazine commentaries (e.g. Welch 2011) and discussion at (President’s Council on Bioethics (2003) Beyond therapy: biotechnology and the pursuit of happiness. The President’s Council on Bioethics, Washington). It seems clear that medicalization has become a topic of interest beyond sociology. Within medical sociology it is a concept that has moved from the periphery of intellectual interest in the 1970s to a central area of interest in the twenty-first century.