Through much of its history, medical sociology has directed far more attention to disease and illness than to health and wellness. Today, medical sociologists, like the medical profession and society and general, are seeking more balance in their focus and are studying health more closely. This expanded focus has produced some important questions. What does it mean to be “healthy” or “well”? Ho...

PROFESSOR John Scarborough in a recent article in this journal has discussed the relationship between doctors and the Roman army, but his methods and his conclusion, which may seem to some to compel assent, demand a cautious and thorough examination before being accepted.' As Sigerist saw, it is necessary to exclude modern preconceptions and to avoid the obfuscation of an account by the introdu...

A military surgeon is a physician who works in a standard clinical field, but who also has to learn to adapt his skills to exceptional circumstances and must cope with special challenges due to his deployment in crisis regions, a fact that is one of the major factors influencing military medical strategy planning. The only certainty is that these special circumstances differ fundamentally from ...

Let me begin with my conclusion: Rob Sampson has written a great book. It is a mustread for almost all sociologists and demographers, and especially important for urbanists. Though I have written numerous book reviews and read countless others, this essay is by far the hardest one I’ve been asked to do. It is hard for two reasons: first, there is so much excellent material in Great American Cit...

Many accounts of the micro-macro link use the philosophical notion of emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to explanation in terms of individuals. However, emergence has also been invoked by methodological individualists; they accept the existence of emergent social properties yet claim that such properties can be reduced ...

In contrast to the antistructuralist and antipositivist agenda that has animated the “narrative turn” in the social sciences since the 1980s, a more uniquely sociological approach has studied stories in the interactional, institutional, and political contexts of their telling. Scholars working in this vein have seen narrative as powerful, but as variably so, and they have focused on the ways in...

Visualizing data is central to social scientific work. Despite a promising early beginning, sociology has lagged in the use of visual tools. We review the history and current state of visualization in sociology. Using examples throughout, we discuss recent developments in ways of seeing raw data and presenting the results of statistical modeling. We make a general distinction between those meth...