Specialization without the Hospital: The Case of British Sports Medicine

Specialization in medicine acts to normalize categories of health and sickness that, once constructed, can appear to be obvious and rational divisions of the body, of disease, or of populations. While the earliest work on this topic, George Rosen’s sociologically informed The specialization of medicine (1944), highlighted the role of medical theory in specialty formation, historians of medicine since the 1940s have overwhelmingly argued that medical specialization is better characterized as an economic, social or political process.1 In Britain, specialization, particularly in connection with the foundation of specialist hospitals, was also a strategic approach taken by doctors competing in a vigorous medical marketplace where the advantages of professional advancement through a hospital consultancy post were monopolized by a tiny urban elite.2 George Weisz’s recent work on specialization also dismisses the idea that conceptual models drove specialization.3 Yet he recognizes that medical theory did play a role in