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Attending to the material discursive constructions of the patient body within cone beam computed tomography ( CBCT) imaging in radiotherapy treatments, in this paper I describe how bodies and machines co-create images. Using an analytical framework inspired by Science and Technology Studies and Feminist Technoscience, I describe the interplay between machines and bodies and the implications of materialities and agency. I argue that patients' bodies play a part in producing scans within acceptable limits of machines as set out through organisational arrangements. In doing so I argue that bodies are fabricated into the order of work prescribed and embedded within and around the CBCT system, becoming, not only the subject of resulting images, but part of that image. The scan is not therefore a representation of a passive subject (a body) but co-produced by the work of practitioners and patients who actively control (and contort) and discipline their body according to protocols and instructions and the CBCT system. In this way I suggest they are ' con-forming' the CBCT image. A Virtual Abstract of this paper can be found at: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of the interplay between epistemology and legitimacy in shaping the conceptualisation of anorexia. It focuses on the process of knowledge production within a particular medical setting – the journal, Psychosomatic Medicine. The journal was founded as part of the first psychosomatic movement in the history of the US seeking to undermine the epistemological foundation of biomedicine: the mind-body division in medical theory and practice. From its inception, the movement was haunted by an ongoing identity problem, institutional uncertainty and scientific ambiguity. The study relies on four separate data sets – articles appearing on anorexia in Medline, archival sources and editorial board minutes of Psychosomatic Medicine, the journal’s referees and their decisions and the articles on anorexia which appeared in Psychosomatic Medicine. The study shows how in the course of its knowledge production, the journal managed to increase the level of consistency while evaluating papers submitted. At the same time it moved towards the dominant biomedical discourse, either through shifting the psychosomatic focus on anorexia from the mind-body interaction to the ‘anorexic body’ only, or alternatively through reducing the methodological model from causal to correlational. This transition in reasoning in the case of anorexia represents an intriguing trade-off between the scope and the reliability of ambiguous medical knowledge in the face of the overriding need to gain legitimacy within the existing dominant biomedical domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its point of departure Bury's (1982) concept of chronic illness as biographical disruption, this paper provides a critical assessment of its fortunes since that time. Having 'rescued' the concept from recent postmodern and disability critiques, the paper provides a series of further reflections on its strengths and weaknesses, including the notion of 'normal illness'; the importance of timing and context; the significance of continuity as well as loss; and the role of biographical disruption itself in the aetiology of illness. This, in turn, provides the basis for a broader set of reflections on the vicissitudes of the biographically embodied self in conditions of late modernity: a situation of chronic reflexivity in which our bodies/selves are continually problematised if not pathologised. The paper concludes, given this 'balance sheet', with a discussion of some potentially fruitful lines of future research, including links with the life-events and inequalities literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bodywork – as work which takes the body as its immediate site of labour – includes forms of service work, healthcare and caring. While work on bodywork has undeniably foregrounded the body, at the same time it has worked with a relatively limited understanding of bodily knowledges and practices. This article uses a theoretical framework taken from writing on Non‐Representational Theory, by Human Geographers, in order to take seriously 'alternative' body knowledge such as energy. The article draws on data from in‐depth interviews conducted with therapeutic massage practitioners in order to take seriously the ways in which energy directs and shapes the work that these bodyworkers do, adding new empirical understandings of what working with energy entails. It makes a broader conceptual contribution to bodywork literatures, advocating the importance of extending analysis beyond social constructionist approaches and questioning the taken‐for‐granted understandings of materiality that are most often drawn upon in order to attend to the kinds of knowledge that are less easy to formalise, anomalous, or that push at the fringes of the definite or the limits of the believable, but which are nonetheless central to many different kinds of bodywork contemporarily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper contributes to debate on social constructionism in the sociology of health and illness through a study of injury among ballet dancers. In this empirical study of classical ballet dancers, we outline a phenomenology of the injured and ageing body in terms of a critical commentary on constructionism. We explore dancers’ experiences of embodiment to illustrate our critique of recent interpretations of dance as a textual practice. Those forms of social constructionism that define the body as a text provide a forceful attack on discourses of authority and legitimation, but we argue that they are problematic as epistemologies and ontologies of embodiment. Through a phenomenological understanding of the experiences of embodiment, we observe how injury and ageing disrupt the practical accomplishments that underpin the ballet habitus and the dancer's identity. Although ballet injuries can terminate a dancing career, they are accepted as an inevitable part of the vocation of ballet. Our aim is to understand the interaction between injuries, dancers’ experiences of discomfort and the social support that emerges from the ballet dancers as a social group. We draw on the concepts of social solidarity and collective consciousness in Emile Durkheim to show that injury is mediated through the social bonding of dancers into a professional ballet company, where injury is accepted as a sign of vocational commitment, and suggest that this ‘collective effervescence’ gives a novel meaning to the idea of a corps de ballet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal trajectories of health, illness and disability—from biographical change to micro‐embodied practices within social time—are important strands within medical sociology and disability studies. Drawing upon a UK‐based qualitative study using diaries and follow‐up interviews to explore everyday life with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), this article explores routines when living with the condition. It focuses specifically on accounts of routines being anticipated, slowed down and stretched out to accommodate and/or care for bodies, with personal and social rhythms weaved in, out and with each other. Such reflections are told through participants' accounts of knowing routines and rhythms, stretching out and pacing morning routines to care for the body and how everyday practices are reimagined as the body and the social meet. Drawing upon the concept of 'Crip Time' where the social bends to meet with the body, this article seeks to illuminate important intersections between medical sociology and disability studies through accounts of living with IBS. This article demonstrates the entanglement of structural, disabling temporal rhythms and embodied temporalities, through an acknowledgement of routines reimagined. It offers a contribution to both medical sociology and disability studies in reimagining social lives with embodied temporalities in mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its point of departure the contested nature of the body, in mainstream theory and the sociology of health and illness alike, this paper seeks, albeit tentatively, to chart a critical realist alternative to these debates using the controversial terrain of chronic illness and disability as a case study. A critical realist approach, it is suggested, enables us to: (i) bring the biological body, impaired or otherwise, 'back in'; (ii) relate the individual to society in a challenging, non-conflationary or non 'unidirectional' way; and (iii) rethink questions of identity, difference and the ethics of care through a commitment to real bodies and real selves, real lives and real worlds. Within all this, it is argued, modern medicine does indeed, contra disability theory and postmodern calls for the pursuit of so-called 'arche-health', have a continuing role to play in the mitigation of human pain and suffering, including the realities of chronic disabling illness conditions and the associated 'greying' of Western populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the narrative of a Latvian countrywoman. In so doing it explores the unstable relationship between history, memory and the body. In particular, it looks at the way in which certain historical events have come to be annexed to the body and are used to explain the development of psychological and mental illness. This account describes state-perpetrated violence, and connects individual ills to a shared history and collective suffering. My informant offered her life story as testimony to the violence and injustice of past experience. The attempt to channel political discontent by the generous provision of medical diagnostic categories is unsuccessful. Rather, bodily experience plays a central role as a yardstick against which the unreasonableness of history is judged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By reading the literature on the doctor-patient relationship in British general practice as an account of the emergence of the doctor as a human subject, connections can be demonstrated between the discipline's apparent success in establishing 'patient- centred' consulting methods and the recent problematisation of the figure of the general practitioner herself. This theme can be traced through an evolving construction of the object of general practice known as 'the patient', and through the changing portrayal of the power relation between doctor and patient. Furthermore, the same theories and techniques which have been used to examine the consultation and construct an image of the patient as a psycho-social agent have, in a parallel process, served to generate images of the doctor as an embodied and vulnerable individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this article we examine the body's status in the complaints that patients filed with a compensation agency. Taking a corpus of letters, we analyse the way in which the patients mobilise their bodily experience from the angle of the damage for which they demand compensation. To this end, we articulate an approach in terms of the sociology of complaint with an approach rooted in the sociology of medicine, health and illness. To analyse the body narratives, we use the notion of loss. We highlight the manner in which patients approach their losses as ‘losses in practice’. These losses are defined by the patients putting forward the concrete experience of a body harmed by the treatment received, and by their formulation of expectations in terms of compensation. We therefore identify four ways in which the reality of the damaged body is given a form in terms of expectations of repair: the ‘body‐producer’, the ‘body‐ecological’, the ‘body‐help’ and the ‘body‐self‐image’. Our analysis adds to studies on the status of the body in care and in complaint by showing: the specific influence of the enunciative situation, the plurality of patient evaluations and their temporal dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, childbearing is often conceptualised as a time when women lose self-control over their bodies. This project examines issues of bodily control through a social constructionist analysis of in-depth interviews with 18 predominantly white, working and middle class women who have recently given birth in the US. Findings indicate that many participants construct themselves as both in and out of control of their bodies during childbearing. Participants also describe body/self relationships in ways that transcend power and control, perceiving the body as autonomous, accommodating and collaborating. Accommodating and collaborating bodies were described here only among participants who gave birth in the midwifery model of care. The findings illuminate various ways of conceptualising the body and point to the use of different bodily discourses by women who give birth in medical and midwifery models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first ‘modern’ presentation of medical ethics is generally acknowledged to be Percival's text of 1803. The main theme of this influential pamphlet was the way in which medical practitioners should relate to one another. Two centuries later, clinical practice has very different moral underpinnings: bioethics, which first emerged in the middle of the 20th century, is not concerned with how doctors should interact with each other but with the responsibilities of medical practitioners to their patients. The shift from an ethics based on the relationship between practitioners to one based on the relationship with their patients is viewed as a major advance brought about by a more enlightened society engaging with the consequences of new technologies. But rather than addressing the changing picture of medical ethics in its own terms (which over the last few decades has been from the perspective of bioethics) I examine the history of medical ethics in its close relationship to the form and nature of the medical profession. Further, in a parallel thread I describe contemporary developments in public health and explore the similarities and connections between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the main findings from an in-depth analysis of the body and touch for people living with HIV. The study used a specialised HIV body image chart and a questionnaire that assessed different aspects of touch interactions. Results, in a longitudinal design, showed that the 18 HIV-positive participants perceived their bodies more negatively than the 15 HIV-negative supporters (control group). Participants in the HIV-positive group also expressed a greater desire for more physical contact than participants in the control group. Comparisons between 'the body now' and 'the body before HIV' showed up significant differences on the construct that assessed feelings of contamination. This construct was also significant in comparisons between HIV-positive and HIV-negative groups. These findings are interpreted through discussions of stigma, the internalisation of widespread negative representations of the HIV-positive body and untouchability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domiciliary care takes place in a special social space: that of the home. Focusing on the provision of bathing in the community, the article explores the spatial ordering of care at home, unpacking a series of interlocking contrasts between the public and the private, and their consequences for the power dynamics of care. These are explored in terms of the ideology of home; the spatial ordering of privacy within the home; and the treatment of the body. Carework trespasses on and re-orders these divisions. The article also explores the contrasting site of the day centre. Baths at day centres are private acts in public places, and in reversing the symbolism of home, they reveal some of the wider meanings of bathing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]