Medykalizacja wyglądu – nowy wymiar zdrowego ciała
The medicalization of image – new dimension of the healthy body

Summary/Abstract: Process of medicalization is inevitably connected with a human body. Nowadays it becomes more and more expanding appropriating subsequent areas of everyday life. Medicalization relates to two categories of events: 1) in a narrow medical meaning it relates to changes within one`s life in the process of an illness (hospitalization, taking medications, rehabilitation). It is important to underline the objectivity of an illness; 2) in a broad sense, given by medical sociologists, it is a process of appropriation of the subsequent areas of everyday life under the control of medicine. Those areas were previously treated as natural, normal (shyness, pregnancy) or they were under the power of other institutions (law, family). The article related to the second meaning. Its aim is to depict one of the areas subject to the medicalization which is human body, and – to be more precise – external appearance (image). The article is to show how the area f medical treatment broadens, what is being subjected to medical control and what are the consequences in private as well as professional life, how definitions of health and illness are being changed. Approaches to the body, dimensions and practices of medicalization will be recalled as well as the concept of lookism will be considered.

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