Health, Medicine and Society

A book coordinated by Fátima Alves has been launched to provide the reader with a global, diverse, and up-to-date view of the field of health and illness.
The chapters in this book illustrate recent developments in the sociology of health and illness in Portugal and Brazil. It includes contributions from various researchers in both countries who have subjected institutions, professions, policies, technologies, actors and the plurality of knowledge, powers and actions that populate this field characterised by its complexity and multidimensionality to the sieve of sociological analysis. In this context, we have endeavoured, in choosing the topics included, to provide readers of this field with a global and diversified vision that contributes, on the one hand, to taking stock of the situation and, on the other, to provide tools that facilitate critical and reflective questioning of the challenges posed by the phenomena of health and illness in contemporary societies. We also seek to contribute to the availability of a bibliography in Portuguese with a general framework in the area of the sociology of health and illness so that it can serve as a basis for various curricular units that form part of the syllabuses of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the social sciences, health and humanities.
Its contributions and tools extend to the design of social policies in this field and to the organisation of services and structures to meet the needs of health and illness/mental health and illness. In this context, the book is aimed at a diverse audience of social scientists, health professionals, social workers, politicians, managers of health structures and associations, undergraduate and graduate students, and all those who work with intercultural relations and are interested in the subject.