Skip to main content

The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge

This video presents the same text shown beside it, spoken and on screen. It adds nothing the text does not say.

State

Medical knowledge itself is socially constructed, meaning it can reflect and reproduce inequalities of gender, class, race, and ethnicity across eras.

Show

Medical advice given to pregnant women has shifted substantially across generations, revealing the era's assumptions as much as its evidence.

Watch for

Calling medical knowledge socially constructed is not a claim that all medical findings are equally arbitrary or wrong.