Cancer in the Community: Class and Medical Authority

By Martha Balshem

Book Overview

Focusing on deep conflicts between the medical establishment and the working class, Martha Balshem chronicles a health education project in "Tannerstown," a pseudonym for a blue-collar neighborhood in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560982519
• ISBN13: 9781560982517
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Smithsonian Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Ethnographic Study of Limitations and Possibilities of Community Based Cancer Prevention Programs

From Preface: "This book is about negotiating professional authority. The professional authority with which I begin my discussion is that of scientific medicine....In the social science literature, medicine has served as a model for critiques of professional authority in general. In this book, too, discussion of the authority of medicine predominates. My purpose, however, is a broader discussion of the roots of professional authority in general and of what both professionals and lay people learn through the experience of such authority. Medical authority...is a complex phenomenon. It is well understood, and can be seen in the stories I tell in this book, that expressions of medical authority are often loaded with meanings about other things -- truth and legitimacy, power and resistance, self and identity. Thus, an examination of medical authority leads naturally to wider topics. My own wider topics here concerns the images of superiority and inferiority that inform all professional practice. At different points in the book, I speak directly to different professional audiences. Health educators are most directly addressed in Chapter 3; physicians in Chapter 4; and anthropologists in Chapter 5. My medical focus is on the disease we call cancer. In the chapters to follow, I will describe conflicts within and between professional and lay systems of belief about cancer. I will describe how these conflicts are expressed by and about residents of...a high-cancer risk, European-American working-class neighborhood in Pennsylvania. The conflicts I will describe involve the powerful authoritative stance of professional scientific medicine; the powerful cultural resistance posed by...residents; and the uneasily derivative and internally conflicted professional positions of both health educators and applied anthropologists." ******* CONTENTS: 1 - Defining the Topic 2 - The Study Community 3 - Project CAN-DO 4 - A Cancer Death 5 - Meaning for the Anthropologist 6 - Changing the Victim