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Body work is a central activity in the practice of many workers in the field of health and social care. This article provides an introduction to the concept of body work -paid work on the bodies of others -and demonstrates its importance for understanding the activities of health and social care workers. Providing an overview of existing research on body work, it shows the manifold ways in which this can inform the sociology of health and illness -whether through a micro-social focus on the inter-corporeal aspects of work in health and social care, or through elucidating our understanding of the times and spaces of work, or through highlighting the relationship between mundane body work and the increasingly global movements of bodies, workers and those worked-upon. The article shows how understanding work undertaken on the bodies of others as 'body work' provides a mechanism for relating work in the sphere of health and social care to that in other sectors, opening up new avenues for research.

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The internet is now a major source of health information for lay people. Within the medical, sociological and popular literatures there have been three main responses to this development. We classify these as 'celebratory', 'concerned' and 'contingent'. This paper falls into the third category and, drawing on techniques of discourse analysis, examines people's accounts of their use of online health resources. It identifies six implicit rules -which we call 'rhetorics of reliability' -that people readily draw upon when articulating why they trust some online sources and not others. In addition participants locate their accounts within broader discursive frameworks in order to present themselves as 'sensible' users. The article concludes by suggesting that there is an emerging concordance between the lay use of the internet for health and illness and dominant (generally) biomedical conceptions of what constitutes 'good quality' health information.

Body work is a central activity in the practice of many workers in the field of health and social care. This article provides an introduction to the concept of body work -paid work on the bodies of others -and demonstrates its importance for understanding the activities of health and social care workers.Providing an overview of existing research on body work, it shows the manifold ways in which this can inform the sociology of health and illness -whether through a micro-social focus on the inter-corporeal aspects of work in health and social care, or through elucidating our understanding of the times and spaces of work, or through highlighting the relationship between mundane body work and the increasingly global movements of bodies, workers and those worked-upon. The article shows how understanding work undertaken on the bodies of others as 'body work' provides a mechanism for relating work in the sphere of health and social care to that in other sectors, opening up new avenues for research.