Concepts of Health, Illness and Disease

Both health care practitioners and health planners are beginning to recognize the importance of differences between lay and professional concepts of health and illness.

Caroline Currer Associate Fellow,Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick Meg Stacey Professor of Sociology, at the University of Warwick

Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1. Concepts of Health and Illness and the Division of Labour in Health Care, 2. Concepts and a Model for the Comparison of Medical Systems as Cultural Systems, 3. The Conceptual Determination (Uberformung) of Individual and Collective Experiences of Illness, 4. Illness: From Causes to Meaning, 5. Competing Ideologies of Reproduction: Medical and Maternal Perspective on Pregnancy, 6. Concepts of Health and Illness in a Sepik Society, 7. Internalising and Externalising Medical Belief Systems: An Ethiopian Example, 8. Reactions of Samoan Burn Patients and Families to Severe Burns, 9. Concepts of Mental Well- and Ill-Being: The Case of Pathan Mothers in Britain, 10. The Unprivileged: A Hundred Years of Their Ideas about Health and Illness, 11. 'Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever': Folk Models of Infection in an English Suburban Community, and Their Relation to Medical Treatment, 12. New Research on the Image of Health, 13. Concepts of Illness Causation and Responsibility: Some Preliminary Data from a Sample of Working-Class Mothers, 14. Two Basic Types of Medical Orientation, Conclusion, Bibliography, About the Contributors, Index