Commentary: From sick men and women, to patients, and thence to clients and consumers--the structuring of the 'patient' in the modern world.

摘要

The juxtaposition of the word cosmology with medicine might appear as somewhat discordant to medically trained professionals. It is an odd word; suggestive as it is of a theory of everything. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Jewson goes to considerable lengths to define the term in his opening paragraphs. Thus, cosmologies are referred to as conceptual structures; as metaphysical attempts to define the nature of medical discourse; as intellectual frames in terms of which people make sense of their worlds; as ways of knowing; and things that function as a medium within and through which perceptions of self and other are expressed, and institutionalized. They might be regarded, suggests Jewson, as akin to Foucault's notion of a 'discursive formation'