Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

<p>A historical exploration of scientific disputes on the causation of so-called ‘prion diseases’, this fascinating book covers diseases including Scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).</p><p>Firstly tracing the twentieth-century history of disease research and biomedicine, the text then focuses on the relations between scientific practice and wider social transformations, before finally building upon the sociologically informed methodological framework.</p><p>Incisive and thought-provoking, <em>The Social Construction of Disease</em> provides a valuable contribution to that well-established tradition of social history of science, which refers primarily to the theoretical works of the sociology of scientific knowledge.</p>