ABSTRACT
Two opposing positions dominate studies of health and its social sources and consequences (see Kleinman 1995 for a fuller treatment). The biomedical orientation—and the psychological theories (especially cognitive neuroscience) that are increasingly closely related to it (Kosslyn 1992)—centers its analysis on the individual, who is further reduced into the objective biological structures that underlie bodily processes. Disease is viewed as a diathesis, an entity, a “natural” form that even if it is evoked by stress unfolds into a “natural” course independent of biography or context. It is held to be a universal, whose essential properties are invariant. Disease is admitted to have social consequences, but these are regarded to be preventable by technological interventions. The social origins of disease and the human contexts of illness experiences are largely left out of the biomedical discourse.
