Innovative Health Technologies and the Social: Redefining Health, Medicine and the Body

TLDR

Conventional medical sociology has engaged unevenly with technology, while recent STS research has offered new insights into how health, illness, and disease are mediated and transformed by technological development. The paper investigates how innovative health technologies are reshaping the relationship between the body, identity, and society, arguing for a qualitative shift and outlining future research directions in STS. The study finds that genetics and informatics are redefining the boundaries between the biological and the social, thereby reshaping the interface between medicine and society.

Abstract

This paper explores the growth and social implications of what are regarded as highly innovative technologies in health. Conventional medical sociology and the sociology of health have had a very uneven engagement with technology, apart from sustained feminist critique of reproductive technologies. More recent analyses developed within the sociology of the body and especially in science and technology studies (STS) have provided new insights into the meaning of health, illness and disease and the way these are mediated by and changed through technological development. Through an examination of recent work the paper argues that current sociological analysis points towards a qualitative shift in the relation between innovative health technologies (IHTs), the body, identity and wider social processes. These changes are especially linked to two increasingly related IHTs - genetics and informatics - and the ways that they reconfigure the social boundaries between the `biological' and the `social' and so between medicine and society. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for the future research agenda within STS, especially in terms of the relationship between the social and the technical.