by Sayantani DasGupta
Medicalization
The term “medicalization” came into popular and academic use in the 1970s and can perhaps be first traced to medical sociologist Ivan Illich’s book Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemeses (1975). Illich used the term in his discussion of “iatrogenesis,” the ways that medicine itself may make social and biological conditions worse as a result of medical intervention. In his book The Medicalization of Society, Peter Conrad defines medicalization as “a process by which nonmedical problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illness and disorders” (2007, 4).
Medicine
The Origin of Medical Terms suggests the word medicine is originally from the Latin medicina, implying the art of healing. The verb medeor may have more complex Indo-European roots, meaning “to think” or “to reflect” (Charyn 1951). In modern usage, medicine implies something more practical—both the pharmaceutical drugs used to treat disease and the profession of medicine itself. Indeed, this transition from a reflective meaning to an active one might be at the root of mainstream Western medicine’s often fraught relationship with the health humanities, a field that asks those whose professional identities are built on agentic “doing” to reflect, analyze, and consider in unfamiliar and often discomfiting ways (Boler 1999).