Towards gender balance: but will women physicians have an impact on medicine?

The increasing numbers of women in medicine in western societies has raised the issue about their impact on medical practice. As a way of addressing the issue, this paper explores women's position in medicine in the Nordic countries, where the medical profession will soon be gender-balanced. Support for both a ghettoization and a vanguard argument for women physicians can be documented. The final section offers three sociological perspectives -- the socialization theory, the neo-Weberian, and the social constructionist -- as theoretical explanations for the gender segregation of medicine and as diagnostic paradigms and potential heuristic devices to aid women's empowerment as medical providers.Physicians Gender Medical profession Nordic countries

Health and society : A forty years perspective

Farewell lecture at the SSKH/U

The rise and fall of Type A man

The argument presented is that Type A man became the subject of a new medical discourse that in the late 1950s unveiled the "cause" of coronary heart disease. Type A man, identified by means of the Type A behavioral pattern, became visible through a new medical gaze. The rise of this new social and diagnostic category was through the medicalization of the attributes of traditional masculinity. The approach of the paper is Foucauldian, and the method is genealogical: it traces the social construction of Type A man in the scientific medical literature in the 1950s and 1960s. It is argued that the fall of Type A man began when the construct was coopted by the psychologists whose efforts to measure the psychological dimensions of the coronary-prone personality and behavioral pattern eventually fragmented the concept.Type A man Type A personality Gender and health