ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the various approaches to sickness as deviance. It explains why illness is considered a form of deviance. The chapter also discusses the some basic categories of Talcott Parsons's sick role concept, and examines the expansion of medicalization. The medical view of illness is that of deviance from a biological norm of health and feelings of well-being. This view involves the presence of a pathogenic mechanism within the body that can be objectively documented. In medical sociology, the term disease has been characterized as an adverse physical state, consisting of a physiological dysfunction within an individual; an illness as a subjective state, pertaining to an individual's psychological awareness of having a disease and usually causing that person to modify his or her behavior. Talcott Parsons introduced his concept of the sick role in his book The Social System, which was written to explain a complex functionalist model of society.
