Rethinking Connecting Sociology’s Role in Health, Illness & Healing From Top to Bottom -- Preface -- Taking "the Promise" Seriously: Medical Sociology in a Time of Change -- Framing the Context and Dynamics of Health and Health Care: The NEM -- Connecting Communities -- Welfare States, and Citizen’s Welfare -- Taking Social Movements Seriously -- "Fundamental Causes" Expanded -- Of Politics and Health -- Community Systems Collide: the Case of the Legal and Mental Health System -- Connecting Health Systems and Health Care -- Medicalization Reconsidered: Understanding Consumer Response -- Conversations of Care -- Expanding Theories of the Doctor-Patient Relationship for Contemporary Landscape of Medicine -- Professions of Medicine -- The Power of Nurses -- The Health Care System -- The Organization of Care -- Health and Health Policy -- Systems of Healing -- Connecting Personal & Cultural Systems -- Taking Health Disparities to Task: The Socio-Cultural Framework -- Taking Social Networks Seriously -- Rethinking Cultural Methods: "Hearsay Ethnography" and the Case of HIV -- Gender Revisited -- The Health Paradox of the Black Middle Class -- Reconsidering Stigma: Lessons from Sociology’s Legacy on Racial Prejudice and Discrimination -- Connecting the Illness Career -- Taking the Life Course Seriously -- Dynamics of Care -- Taking "History" and "history" Seriously -- Stories Matter -- Network Dynamic and Use of Services -- VI. Connecting the Individual and the Body -- Identity and Illness -- Taking Individuals Seriously: Developing Tailored Outcomes -- How Socio-Economic Status Works Through the Body to Shape Health and Illness -- Taking Biology Seriously -- Body Related Social Movements.

The Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness & Healing advances the understanding of medical sociology by identifying the most important contemporary challenges to the field and suggesting directions for future inquiry. The editors provide a blueprint for guiding research and teaching agendas for the first quarter of the 21st century. In a series of essays, this volume offers a systematic view of the critical questions that face our understanding of the role of social forces in health, illness and healing. It also provides an overall theoretical framework and asks medical sociologists to consider the implications of taking on new directions and approaches. Such issues may include the importance of multiple levels of influences, the utility of dynamic, life course approaches, the role of culture, the impact of social networks, the importance of fundamental causes approaches, and the influences of state structures and policy making.