Medicine, the Medical Profession, and the Welfare State

Abstract

If every doting mother once wanted nothing more for each of her dutiful sons than that he should become a white-coated doctor, it was with good reason. For from the triumph of medicine’s “professional project” at the end of the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s, physicians enjoyed a position unrivaled by any other American occupation. Dominating the hospitals in which they worked (and the other health professionals with whom they worked), exercising broad cultural authority over the ways in which sickness would be conceived and treated, and earning generous incomes secured by a monopoly of the market for medical services, physicians represented the very model of a successful profession. Since the mid-1960s, however, a few cracks have begun to show in the success of medical professionalism. If doting mothers (and fathers) may have to find new ambitions for their sons (and daughters), so, too, will sociologists have to rethink their understanding of medicine as well as of the professions more generally.