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a co-production in everyday life, a claim that health led to an interest in the impact of mid-
is constantly fragile and needs endless renewal wifery (e.g., DeVries et al., 2001; Oakley,
and re-legitimation by interaction partners. 1980) and public health nursing (Dingwall,
This becomes an important theme for studies 1977; Dingwall and McIntosh, 1978) on
of doctor/patient interaction such as those by women’s and children’s health. Feminists
Strong (2001) and by Maynard (2003). drew attention to what hitherto had been neg-
In the early 1970s, further themes from the lected, a qualitatively different domain of lay
labeling perspective were introduced through or unpaid care beyond medicine (e.g., Graham,
the concept ‘medicalization’, as proposed by 1984; Stacey, 1984, 2002).
Irving Zola (1972). The medicalization thesis Although a popular thesis, the empirical
has been a popular framework in medical basis of medicalization was questioned from
sociology and absorbed into public dis- an early point, most notably by P. M. Strong
course. In its crude version it harbors a (1979) in Britain. Drawing on his own
conflict perspective: physicians are not research on alcoholism, Strong pointed out
Parsonian benevolent and altruistic servants, that most physicians had little interest in
but an occupational group with an interest in expanding their professional jurisdiction and
expanding its domain of authority. Although argued that medical sociologists had simply
Zola himself did not portray the process used statements by the profession’s moral
of medicalization in such conflictual and entrepreneurs to illustrate an a priori critique
conspiratorial terms, the medicalization based on their own interests and prejudices.
thesis resonated with a variety of social A similar argument has been made by
movements, which began critically to exam- Maynard (1991), who noted how
ine the client’s status in larger social institu- doctor/patient interaction studies had identi-
tions and the role of certain professionals fied power and oppression in phenomena,
(physicians, police, educators) as agents of such as the structural organization of turn-
social control. taking or the maintenance of topical and
The (then) new feminist health movement thematic coherence, that are much better
is a case in point. The medicalization thesis understood as functional requirements of the
became a way of documenting that women’s interaction.
primary care health needs were inappropri- The inaugural themes of cooperation and
ately medicalized. According to feminists, consensus were, then, subject to challenge by
medical knowledge pathologized women’s the 1970s as sociologists sought to bring
bodies, and medicine was part of a broader issues of power and control to the heart of the
patriarchal control of women (e.g., Chesler, discipline. New dimensions were added
1972; Ehrenreich and English, 1973, 1978). in the 1980s, when sociologists of health
Women’s health advocates urged women to began to draw in a significant way upon post-
regain control over their health, especially in structural theorizing, e.g., the works of
the area of reproductive health, and to Michel Foucault (1965, 1975). Foucault’s
demand health services which would con- approach to power reconceptualized the sub-
sider women’s specific health needs. In the ject, who was no longer viewed as a creative
US, the early women’s self-help movement agent in the manner of the conflict and inter-
of the 1970s resulted in the development of actionist perspectives, but as a ‘complex and
specific women’s health agendas in the polit- variable function of discourse’ (Foucault,
ical context, and also commercialized ver- 1977: 138). A range of analyses explored the
sions of women’s health centers from the late ways in which specific historical configura-
1980s onward (Morgen, 2002). In tions of knowledge and power constructed par-
the European context, the importance of the ticular ways of knowing about and acting in
welfare state and of other health professions relation to health and illness (e.g., Armstrong,
beyond medicine in promoting women’s 1987; Arney and Bergen, 1984; Turner, 1987).