Editorial.

Welcome to the latest issue of Health Sociology Review, a journal of The Australian Sociological Association. In this edition you will find articles and book reviews contributed from Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and South Australia), Canada, Lebanon, and Sweden.

The articles provide an indicative sample of the many different approaches to health and illness, health policy, and medicine that are being taken by sociologists at this time. Contributors have utilised qualitative and quantitative empirical approaches, provided theoretical and conceptual analyses, and offered reflections on pressing social issues.

Offering a quantitative approach to research, Gerry Veenstra from the University of British Columbia, Canada, utilises large data sets and statistical analysis to examine and demonstrate the relationship between social status and health. Veenstra concludes, perhaps not surprisingly, that there is a strong relationship between our subjective personal assessment of social status and our mental well-being.

Three of our papers draw from qualitative empirical studies. Katherine Carroll and Kerreen Reiger from La Trobe University in Victoria, examine the recent emergence of Lactation Consultants, a new occupational speciality. Having seen these experts in action this year when they cared for my daughter and brand new grand-daughter (Billie Adele, a little redhead who weighed in at only 6lb) and who was initially far too cross with the world to feed easily, I have only admiration for these (mostly) women with their enormous patience and good advice. And yes, surprisingly, even though we have been having babies and feeding them for thousands of years, knowledge about breastfeeding has changed. My advice as a grandmother was 'corrected' more than once by the Lactation Consultant, with a 'we don't do it that way anymore'. This paper takes the personal experience of breastfeeding into the professional, bureaucratic environment of the hospital, and reflects on the way these experts, working on the margins of medicine, constantly negotiate between medical and maternalist discourses, professional and nurturing roles.

Two Canadians, Colleen Reid (Simon Fraser University) and Carol Herbert (University of Western Ontario), use interviews and group meetings to investigate the impact of poverty and welfare on women. Both material circumstances and the processes of stereotyping are shown to lead toward social stigma and the adoption of negative health behaviours.