Past and Present: Three National Sociologies of Health and Medicine

Abstract

Each of the three countries studied in this volume were recipients of a set of ideas, social practices and institutional forms initially developed in Europe. This process of trans-national ‘seeding’ raises a number of intriguing questions about the discipline of sociology, and about disciplines in general. In what sense was ‘sociology’ – as an emerging intellectual field – transplanted from one country to another rather than created anew in each setting? Equally, were notions about health and medicine as fundamentally social concerns, introduced or produced in each new location? What factors shaped these processes of disciplinary ‘seeding’, and were the same social forces responsible for the specialisation of sociology into the new field of the sociology of health and medicine? Moreover, to what extent does the sociology of health and medicine in each of the three countries differ in its practices, its forms of organisation or its knowledge base, and what factors have created these differences?