Social change in the past quarter of a century has had a considerable impact on health and medicine. Modernity, Medicine and Health brings together a variety of influential sociologists who present their theories on the nature and depth of change, and on the modernity/postmodernity debates, and apply them to issues of health and healing. Among the issues covered are the parameters of the futures of medical sociology itself, the potential and limitations of the postmodern perspective, the interface with public health, analyses of class and gender, new notions of citizenship, complementary medicine, and life and death in postmodern times.