Review

A just sociology of health

HEALTH MATTERS: a sociology of illness, prevention and care
Alan Petersen and Charles Waddell (eds)
Open University Press, 1998, £16.99

Surely the title of this book must make it irresistible to readers of healthmatters magazine. I was particularly interested in the gloss Petersen and Waddell – both key figures in the sociology of health and health promotion in Western Australia – provide on the familiar grammatical word play of health matters as both noun and verb.

They summarise the importance of health to sociologists as wanting to ‘improve the health of people: to care for that fragile ecology of body, mind and spirit through which we share life with each other…a social ecology of the whole person…as the person interacts with others’.

There is recognition too that health matters to each of us as an individual but a defining theme of the book is concerned with identifying what is a ‘just sociology of health’, echoing Petersen’s earlier book (published in Australia) called Just Health.

This theme is well developed by the contributors, with challenging critical approaches to the familiar rhetoric of a welfarist model of inequalities in health but an overarching conviction that ‘health matters are profoundly social in cause and consequence’.

The topics covered, drawn from authors in Australia, the UK and New Zealand, include studies of health care in the popular media, issues of trust and uncertainty in health care, death and dying, children’s drawings related to health, racism in health care, and relationships between health care workers and patients/consumers.

But this is a limited list: the chapters are quite short – 22 in 360 pages – and provide interesting tasters of the authors’ ideas and research, but together yield a book that functions as a ‘reader’. This is supported by the grouping of the chapters: sociology matters, experience matters, care matters and prevention matters, and by the helpful editorial introductions to each section, which offer a synthesis of its main ideas and contexts.

I welcomed the provocative questioning of the meanings and applications to practice of key terms such as justice and participation, and also of categories and concepts.

The chapters locate biomedical knowledge and practice in social and historical contexts and in relation to lived experience, avoiding both the postmodernist mire of ‘anti-realism’ and a modernist overemphasis on the possibility of objective truths and realities.

The authors offer stimulating insights into their work, do not obscure their subjects, and demonstrate the rich variety of sociological research and thinking about health matters that is going on at the moment.

The book certainly encouraged me to follow up references and sources, and I anticipate others would use it similarly, perhaps particularly students of health studies but also all of us pressed for time and energy to keep up to date with current work.