Book Review

摘要

There is little doubt that the medicalisation of society, the framing of normality as a medical issue, has resulted in harmful violations of medicine’s first principle: ‘to do no harm.’ In his analysis of this, Justman draws from both medical and non-medical professionals to critique inappropriate labelling of problems, concerns, complaints, symptoms and assorted conditions into categories of discrete disorders. ‘Medicine has extended its writ not only over the less sick but many not sick at all, such as patients suffering from normal distress,’ explains the author (p. 12). To build his arguments, Justman uses a myriad of sources, from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, to Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thomas Kuhn, Christopher Lasch and a wealth of medical clinicians.