Bernice A. Pescosolido is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and Director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research. Professor Pescosolido received a B.A. from the University of Rhode Island in 1974 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982. She has focused her research and teaching on social issues in health, illness, and healing. Jack K. Martin is the Director of the Karl F. Schussler Institute for Social Research at Indiana University. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Utah in 1980 and has been on the faculty at Indiana University since 2001. Anne Rogers is Professor of the Sociology of Health Care and Head of the Health Sciences Research Group at the University of Manchester. Her research interests lie broadly within the sociology of health care, mental health and most recently social networks, relationships and personal long term condition management. Her research has ranged from exploring, patients experience of psychiatric services, the social patterning of mental health problems, lay epidemiology, professional knowledge and sociological analysis of old and new forms of treatment. Her recent research interests include a focus on the 'work' that patients undertake in the area of long term condition management and addressing how social position, networks, relationships and illness work undertaken in domestic settings connect to accessing resources in local communities and health services to support living with long term condition management. Jane D. McLeod is Professor of Sociology and Director of Undergraduate Studies. She also teaches in the Human Biology Program. Jane came to IU in 1998, after serving on the faculties at the University of Minnesota and SUNY-Albany. Her research traverses the areas of social psychology, medical sociology, sociology of mental health, stratification, and the life course.

This volume offers a systematic view of the critical questions that face our understanding of the role of social forces in health, illness and healing. It identifies contemporary challenges to the field and suggests directions for future inquiry.

This seminal reference work takes medical sociology to the next level by investigating the roles of social forces in health, illness, and healing

Rethinking Connecting Sociology's Role in Health, Illness & Healing From Top to Bottom.- Preface.- Taking "the Promise" Seriously: Medical Sociology in a Time of Change.- Framing the Context and Dynamics of Health and Health Care: The NEM.- Connecting Communities.- Welfare States, and Citizen's Welfare.- Taking Social Movements Seriously.- "Fundamental Causes" Expanded.- Of Politics and Health .- Community Systems Collide: the Case of the Legal and Mental Health System.- Connecting Health Systems and Health Care.- Medicalization Reconsidered: Understanding Consumer Response.- Conversations of Care.- Expanding Theories of the Doctor-Patient Relationship for Contemporary Landscape of Medicine.- Professions of Medicine.- The Power of Nurses.- The Health Care System.- The Organization of Care.- Health and Health Policy.- Systems of Healing.- Connecting Personal & Cultural Systems.- Taking Health Disparities to Task: The Socio-Cultural Framework.- TakingSocial Networks Seriously.- Rethinking Cultural Methods: "Hearsay Ethnography" and the Case of HIV.- Gender Revisited.- The Health Paradox of the Black Middle Class.- Reconsidering Stigma: Lessons from Sociology's Legacy on Racial Prejudice and Discrimination.- Connecting the Illness Career.- Taking the Life Course Seriously.- Dynamics of Care.- Taking "History" and "history" Seriously.- Stories Matter.- Network Dynamic and Use of Services.- VI. Connecting the Individual and the Body.- Identity and Illness.- Taking Individuals Seriously: Developing Tailored Outcomes.- How Socio-Economic Status Works Through the Body to Shape Health and Illness.- Taking Biology Seriously.- Body Related Social Movements.