| Every body gets sick. Disease and
injury make us suffer throughout our lives, until finally, some attack on the
body brings our existence to an end. Fortunately, most of us in modem
industrialized societies can take relatively good health for granted most of the
time. In fact, we tend to fully realize the importance of good health only when
we or those close to us become seriously ill. At such times we keenly appreciate
the ancient truth that health is our most precious asset, one for which we might
readily give up such rewards as power, wealth, or fame. Because iii health is universal problem, affecting the individual and society, the human response to sickness is always socially organized. No society leaves the responsibility for maintaining health and treating iii health entirely to the individual. Each society develops its own concepts of health and sickness and authorizes certain people to decide who is sick and how the sick should be treated. Around this focus there arises, over time, a number of standards, values, groups, statuses, and roles: in other words, an institution (体系，机构). To the sociologist (社会学家), then, medicine is the institution concerned with the maintenance of health and treatment of disease. In the simplest pre-industrial societies, medicine is usually an aspect of religion. The social arrangements for dealing with sickness are very elementary, often involving only two roles: the sick and the healer (治疗者). The latter is typically also the priest (牧师), who relies primarily on religious ceremonies, both to identify and to treat disease: for example, bones may be thrown to establish a cause, songs may be used to bring about a cure. In modern industrialized societies, on the other hand, the institution has become highly complicated and specialized, including dozens of roles' such as those of brain surgeon, druggist, hospital administrator, linked with various organizations such as nursing homes, insurance companies, and medical schools. Medicine, in fact, has become the subject of intense sociological interest precisely because it is now one of the most pervasive and costly institutions of modem society. |