Health Risks and Coronary Heart Disease: Medicalization of Men’s Emotions.

This paper examines those etiological theories which have proposed that certain psychosocial factors, more commonly called stress factors, compose the key cause to coronary heart disease.The aim is to examine the tendency to look within individuals for explanations for their behavior and for CHD. The paper shows that there are three phases in this discussion: 1) the medical literature in the 1950s and 1960s that medicalized men?s cultural repertoire of violent behavior and linked aggression to CHD, 2) the research in the 1970s and 1980s that presented men?s emotional inexpressivity as a health risk, 3) during the past decade research has tended to naturalize aggression and to interpret it as the sign of the ?body?s own wisdom? when threatened by external environmental stressors. The body has been unmarked by gender in this medical or sociobiological discussion, although at issue has been the bodies of white middle-class men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]