ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the relation between deviance and disease has been debated widely across disciplines and fields and it is through cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary exchange that the complexities of medicalization can best be understood. It engages with these questions and debates, but also seeks to complicate linear and monolithic narratives of the medicalization of deviance. The chapter demonstrates that, throughout the past 150 years or so, the relation between criminal and sexually deviant behaviours and disease was debated critically inside and outside medical fields of knowledge. It focuses on the emergence of the intersecting fields of criminal anthropology, sexology and psychiatry from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Critics of diagnostic psychiatry and of the DSM, in particular, have argued that many of the behaviours included in the manual are not indicators of discrete underlying diseases. The medicalization of deviance continues to raise challenging questions about diagnostic validity and objectivity.
