Health, Illness and Medicine
Chapter 13 Further reading and weblinks

Bury, Michael (1997) Health and Illness in a Changing Society, Routledge, London.
This covers contemporary debates in an accessible and research-informed style. Its principal topics are health beliefs and behaviour, inequalities in health, the doctor-patient relationship, chronic illness and disability, death and the dying, and the body and risk. Ideas about the body and risk bridge into wider sociological theory and provide students with an exciting range of topics to explore.

Scambler, Graham and Higgs, Paul (eds) (1998) Modernity, Medicine and Health, Routledge, London.
This book, likely to be too demanding for most students, provides those teaching in this area with a very thorough exploration of how the conventional approaches and issues in the sociology of health and medicine need to be reconsidered in light of the impact of late modern or postmodern society. There are various topics covered and they provide a rich agenda for discussion sessions for staff who are keen to develop more conceptual issues.

Webster, Charles (1998) The National Health Service: A Political History, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Webster has provided a masterly review of the development of the NHS through to its present state, 50 years since its inception in 1948. Webster discusses the current crises facing the NHS and looks forward to what we might expect to see in terms of socialised medicine beyond the millennium. This is a clear and accessible read for staff and students alike.