Gender and the medicalization of healthcare

Abstract

Medicalization is a key concept of modernity, ubiquitously used in the social and medical sciences since the 1970s. We begin by adopting what sociologist Peter Conrad calls its essential meaning: ‘defining a problem in medical terms, usually as an illness or disorder, or using a medical intervention to treat it’ (Conrad, 2005: 3, emphasis in the original). In this large and growing field, scholars generally agree that medicalization was a critical - if not fundamental - transformation of the 20th century. As we will show in this chapter, scholars disagree about its definitions, its connection with the dynamics and conceptual apparatuses of modernity and a global economy, and its cultural situatedness.