Commodification of health and illness

“ . . . is one of the most important and understudied developments in 20th-century society. . . . In using ‘commodification’ in the context of medical history, I mean to draw attention to the process by which bodily experiences such as pain are assigned value (monetary and otherwise) by physicians, patients, insurance companies, and others. ‘Commodification’ also turns our attention to the ways in which analogous collections of experiences are named, take on conceptual coherence, and are subsumed under the titled ‘disease,’ in such a way that they can be called upon by professionals, laypersons, and politicians in bargaining for rights, power, status, or economic position. . . . It is this profound transformation in disease . . . that the story of sickle cell disease chronicles” (Wailoo, III, 18, 106, 126).