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British Medical Bulletin 69:9-16 (2004)
British Medical Bulletin, Vol. 69 © The British Council 2004; all rights reserved

The social origins and expressions of illness

Merrill Singer

Center for Community Health Research, Hispanic Health Council, Hartford, Connecticut, USA

Correspondence to: Merrill Singer, Center for Community Health Research, Hispanic Health Council, 175 Main St., Hartford, Connecticut 06106, USA. E-mail: Anthro8566{at}Aol.Com

This chapter draws on British medical anthropologist Ronald Frankenburg’s notion of the ‘making social of disease’, and his related concepts ‘the making of disease’ and ‘the making individual of disease’, to review the biomedical conception of disease from the perspective of medical anthropology. As opposed to the tendency of biomedicine to treat disease as a category in nature, a finite and objective reality discoverable through scientific endeavour, medical anthropology seeks to demonstrate the social origins of both the biomedical conception of disease and the expression of the sicknesses labelled diseases by doctors.


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