Prologue: Sociology, Medicine and Medical Sociology

Do all disciplines fret over the state of their own intellectual and policy-relevant health? Is it a symptom of our hyper-reflexive and confessional times that collective anxiety has to be rehearsed over the track record, and present and projected performance of a group of scholars? Medical sociology’s lengthy reflections on the state of its own practice are recognizable as part of a more general trend, whereby the certainties of bodies of knowledge and the limits of disciplinary boundaries have been undermined in the light of post-structuralist thought. As sociology examines the social construction of various forms of knowledge, in particular socio-cultural contexts, how could its practitioners avoid turning the analysis on itself? Sociology’s particular interest in the social nature of human endeavour and the ideological bent and constructed nature of progress and achievement renders the discussion of disciplinary origins, limits and prospects particularly hard to grasp. But that’s not a reason for not trying. Medical sociology is a reflexive area of academic endeavour which has devoted a large number of words to considering its own origins, legitimacy, progress and potential. Since the contested moment of its inception, medical sociology has struggled for legitimacy on account of its ambiguous outsider status with regard to both sociology and medicine (Bloom, 2002: 25). In the process of establishing itself as a distinct area of theoretical and empirical research, medical sociology has fretted over its relationships with both medicine and sociology, regarding neither as taking its own claims to expertise sufficiently seriously. Horrobin likened medical sociology’s situation between two unsympathetic existing disciplines to