Heart-Sick

“In this cutting-edge book, Janet Shim meticulous unearths the inner logic of epidemiology to show how the familiar categories of race, gender, and class are inserted into medical knowledge in ways that strip them of social significance. Her fascinating interviews reveal a broad gulf between how experts conceive of the causes of health inequalities and how ordinary people caught in webs of social disadvantage understand what makes them sick. Heart-Sick takes a vexing and high-stakes question - Who gets sick and why? - and sharply reframes it from a new vantage point.”-Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research “Janet Shim has produced a carefully crafted ‘big picture’ overview of the competing explanations of the incidence of heart disease. This is an important contribution to such disparate fields as epidemiology, the expanding literature in science studies, and sociological theories of race and class that attempt to account for health disparities.”-Troy Duster, author, Backdoor to Eugenics

Janet K. Shim is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco.