Medical screening raises fundamental issues for sociological inquiry, but at present a well-developed sociology of medical screening is lacking. This special issue on the sociology of screening brings together an exciting collection of new work that tackles medical screening from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. In this opening paper, we begin by explaining what we mean b...

When working together, people engage in non-contractual and informal interactions that constitute the sociology of the group. We use behavioral models and a unique survey of medical groups to analyze how group sociology influences physician incentive pay and behavior. We conclude that informal interactions among group members influence pay practices and behaviors, but the relationship is comple...

This paper examines recent trends in theory in health sociology in the United States and finds that the use of theory is flourishing. The central thesis is that the field has reached a mature state and is in the early stage of a paradigm shift away from a past focus on methodological individualism (in which the individual is the primary unit of analysis) toward a growing utilization of theories...

1 Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 2 Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 4 Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts,...

The North East Medical Sociology Group is pleased to announce details of the next half day seminar to be held on the afternoon of Wednesday 26 March 2014 at Teesside University, Darlington Campus. There will be a keynote presentation by Professor Sarah Nettleton from the Department of Sociology at University of York. There will additionally be three presentations from local speakers, together w...

A content analysis of the publications of Australian sociologists since 1960 addresses international debates over the ‘theoretical impoverishment’ of the sub-discipline of the sociology of health, illness and medicine. The results of the study offer a challenge to these concerns, pointing to a robust and constantly developing sub-field, well-integrated within the parent discipline, and characte...

This paper argues for an approach within the medical humanities that draws on the theoretical legacy of cultural materialism as a framework for reading cultural practices and their relationship to the social and economic order. It revisits the origins and development of cultural materialism in cultural studies and literary studies between the 1970s and 1990s and considers how, with adaptation, ...

BACKGROUND Premedical students are educated in basic biological and health sciences. As a complement to traditional premedical coursework, medical school applicants are encouraged to shadow practitioners, with the hope that observation will introduce students to the culture and practice of healthcare. Yet the shadowing experience varies widely across practitioners and institutions; resources th...

This article examines the book Social class and mental illness: a community study by A.B. Hollingshead and F.C. Redlich as it marks the fifty year of its publication. It highlights the role of these researchers who, with distinct educational backgrounds (sociology and psychiatry), were part of the pioneering group in the 1950s that initiated the construction of medical sociology. Their careful ...

In this commentary, we establish a relationship between medical sociology and the study of medical tourism and cross-border healthcare by introducing Ronald Andersen’s behavioral model of healthcare use, and linking this model to the recent empirical study of Kovacs et al. on patients travelling to Hungary for orthopedic treatment. Finally, we plead for more measurement in the field of patient ...