Assignment Task:
Reading Guide for Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy
Purpose:
The purpose of this assignment is for you to respond to the book, Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention, by Sylvia Noble Tesh, and to apply the theoretical tools you learned there. It requires that you read the entire book in order to do a thorough job of answering the questions and applying the concepts.
Part I: What were your overall impressions of the book?
What did you find most interesting in the book? Did anything in the book lead you to try to learn more? What did you learn that helped to change your understanding of the social world? Was there anything that surprised you?
Part II: Reading Guide Questions
What is distinctive about approaching medicine and health as a social phenomena? How does Tesh make the case for this argument? What kinds of questions does such an approach make us ask about "modern" health care, the experience of illness, and the role of health professionals, and medical institutions?
Tesh identifies 4 main 19th century theories of health (contagion; supernatural; personal behavior; miasma). Which of these theories do you think still holds power over the way we think today? Why?
Part III: Application
Find an article addressing a health care issue (or locate a specific health care policy), and analyze it in terms of which theory you see reflected there. Is the approach to the issue rooted in a monocausal, multicausal, or social/structural approach? Does it emphasize biomedical issues, environmental factors, or personal responsibility? (Is the goal to address the agent, the environment, or the host, to use the epidemiological triad.) Do you think that the proposed response is effective? Does it address the primary cause? If not, how might you approach it differently?
If you have any concern about whether your article is a good choice, feel free to send it my way and I can offer some feedback.
Please include:
A full reference citation for this book and the article/policy you choose using American Sociological Association (ASA) or American Psychological Association (APA) style
Your name.
In text citations should be in ASA or APA Style
Remember that quotations taken directly from a text should have quotation marks at the beginning and end and the authors' last name, date and page numbers follow the end quote.
Example: After the magazine article first appeared, until the 1970's, "the woman behind the HeLa cells would be known most often as Helen Lane, and sometimes as Helen Larson, but never as Henrietta Lacks. And because of that, her family had no idea her cells were alive" (Skloot 2010: 109).
The papers should be at least 1250 words (approx. 5 pages double spaced). Please use Times New Roman font, 12 point. Please go into detail when answering all of the questions.
This is the book below:
Tesh, Sylvia Noble. 1988. Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.