Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (Health and Medicine in American Society)

Framing Disease is a constructivist account of disease and medicine: How diseases become real through the interactions of theories and practices, how various kinds of experts can speak to the relevance of a disease, and how disease acts as an instrument of social and political power.

The papers in this collection range between ‘decent’ and ‘excellent’ (an accomplishment for an academic work of this kind, which usually includes a few real stinkers). A core work if you do any kind of history/sociology/anthropology of medicine, although 20 years after publication, you probably already have an opinion on the usefulness of constructivist methods.