HISTORICAL STUDY OF ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MEDICAL SOCIOLOGY

SOCIOLOGY

Medical sociology is a sub discipline of sociology that studies the social causes and consequences of health and illness. In the United States, John Shaw Billings, organizer of the National Library of Medicine and compiler of the Index Medicus, wrote about hygiene and sociology in 1879; Charles McIntire defined medical sociology in 1894; Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from an American medical school, published a collection of essays on medical sociology in 1902, as did James Warbasse in 1909 (Bloom 2002). Merton and his colleagues (1957) extended the structural functionalist mode of analysis to the socialization of medical students, with Renee Fox’s paper on training for uncertainty ranking as a major contribution. Four years later, Howard Becker and his associates published Boys in White (1961), a study of medical school socialization conducted from a symbolic interactionist perspective. This study became a sociological classic and was important for both its theoretical and methodological con tent. The techniques in participant observation provided a basis for the seminal work on death and dying and subsequent innovations in theory and methods by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1965, 1967). Michel Foucault and takes the view that knowledge about the body, health, and illness reflects subjective, historically specific human concerns and is subject to change and reinterpretation. Other areas in which British medical sociologists have excelled include studies of medical practice, emotions, and the experience of illness. Medical sociology also became a major socio logical specialty in Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Israel, and began to emerge in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s after the collapse of communism. Moreover, medical sociology owes more to medicine than to sociology for its origin and initial financial support, so the relationship that has evolved is essentially supportive. As medical sociology continues on its present course, it is likely to emerge as one of sociology’s core specialties as the pursuit of health increasingly becomes important in everyday social life.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.