Wendy Simonds, "Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization" (Routledge, 2016)

In Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization (Routledge, 2016), Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday experiences, culture, and social life. Simonds documents her own Hospital Land adventures and draws on a wide range of U.S. cultural representations — from memoirs to medical mail, from hospital signs to disaster movies — in order to urge critical thinking about conventional notions of care, health, embodiment, identity, suffering, and mortality.

This book is intended for general readers, medical practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students in courses on medical sociology, medicine, medical ethics, nursing, public health, carework, visual culture, cultural studies, and gerontology.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations people and place at festivals and celebrations. His next book project is on research that he conducted about a canoeing and kayaking event that occurs annually on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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