"From Careless Consumptives to Recalcitrant Patients: The Historical Construction of Noncompliance."

According to the author's abstract of an article published in Social Science & Medicine, "Thousands of articles on 'noncompliance' have appeared since 1975. Yet the term has been criticized as paternalistic - as wrongly implying that patients should necessarily follow doctors' orders. This paper, which reviews how noncompliance has been constructed historically, argues that the problem with noncompliance is more than just one of terminology. Changing social and cultural factors during the 20th century have influenced the way in which uncooperative patients have been described. For example, resentment of poor immigrants in the early 1900s led doctors to describe tuberculosis patients...

Want to see the full article?

• Purchase this article for only $3.00