The thesis focuses on the phenomenon of medicalization, especially as applied to the male and female body. I examine the normalizing effect of expansive medical control from the 19th century to date. Medicalization is essentially understood as a normalizing process, which, due to the position of power occupied by biomedicine, constructs and reconstructs moral imperatives (norms). The concept itself was elaborated in its various aspects by authors such as Peter Conrad, Ivan Illich, Irving Kenneth Zola, or Michel Foucault in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In the course of about two hundred years covered by the thesis, the discourse about the male and female gender and sex had a profound effect on the framework in which health and illness were conceptualized in connection with a wide range of life events. The case-centered analysis of the areas dealt with in the thesis (such as sexual health, or the changes that accompany aging) offers an opportunity to discuss the criticism of medicalization within a solid conceptual framework
