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IJE Advance Access originally published online on May 11, 2009
International Journal of Epidemiology 2009 38(3):637-639; doi:10.1093/ije/dyp182
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.

Commentary: From sick men and women, to patients, and thence to clients and consumers—the structuring of the ‘patient’ in the modern world

Lindsay Prior

Department of Sociology, School of Sociology & Centre of Excellence for Public Health, Queens University, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK. E-mail: l.prior@qub.ac.uk

Accepted 30 June 2008

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The juxtaposition of the word cosmology with medicine might appear as somewhat discordant to medically trained professionals. It is an odd word; suggestive as it is of a theory of everything. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Jewson goes to considerable lengths to define the term in his opening paragraphs. Thus, cosmologies are referred to as conceptual structures; as metaphysical attempts to define the nature of medical discourse; as intellectual frames in terms of which people make sense of their worlds; as ways of knowing; and things that function as a medium within and through which perceptions of self and other are expressed, and institutionalized. They might be regarded, suggests Jewson, as akin to Foucault's notion of a ‘discursive formation’.

Suffice to say that the language and preliminary content of Jewson's 1976 paper1 inevitably reflect the concerns of the age. Thus, the reference to cosmology, in particular, is characteristic of a sociology that . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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