The aim of this book is to bring together the field of media studies with that of the sociology of health and illness (SHI). As a sociologist concerned with health matters, becoming interested a few years ago in media representations of illness and health-care topics, I noticed early on in my studies that SHI had not kept up with developments in media studies. For example, reviewing many small studies done on aspects of health and illness in the media, I noticed that the assumptions these made about the place of mass media in the everyday life of audiences were uninformed by the latest thinking in the field of.
