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2 Medical Sociology and Sociological Theory
WILLIAM C. COCKERHAM AND GRAHAM SCAMBLER
The link between medical sociology and sociological theory is crucial to the subdiscipline. Theory binds medical sociology to the larger discipline of sociology more extensively than any other aspect of the sociological enterprise. Sociological theory is also what usually distinguishes research in medical sociology from socially oriented studies in allied fields, like public health, epidemiology, and health services research. Whereas seminal sociological contributions in quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, along with many fundamental concepts of social behavior, have been adopted by multidisciplinary approaches in several fields, sociological theory allows medical sociology to remain unique among the health-related social and behavioral sciences. This could be considered somewhat surprising because medical sociology has often been described in the past as atheoretical. It is true that much of the work in the field historically has been applied to practical problems rather than theoretical questions. That is, it was intended to help solve a clinical problem or policy issue, rather than develop theory or utilize it as a tool to enhance understanding.
Medical sociology was not established until after World War II when the American government provided extensive funding through the National Institutes of Health for joint sociological and medical research projects. The same situation prevailed in Western Europe, where, unlike in the US, few medical sociologists were affiliated with university sociology faculties and connections to the general discipline of sociology were especially weak (Claus 1982; Cockerham 1983). It was primarily through the stimulus of the availability of government funding that sociologists and health professionals embraced medical sociology as a new subdiscipline. Funding agencies were not interested in theoretical work, but sponsored research that had some practical utility in postwar society as Western governments had come to realize that social factors were important for health.
By the end of the twentieth century, however, this situation had changed significantly. Most research in medical sociology remains oriented toward practical problem solving, but the use of sociological theory in this endeavor is now widespread. There has been a general evolution of work in medical sociology that combines both applied and theoretical perspectives, with the utilization of theory becoming increasingly common as a framework for explaining or predicting health-related social behavior. At the same time, medical sociology moved away from a state of dependence upon medicine for defining and guiding research agendas to a position of relative independence. Although the relationship between medical sociology and medicine has been important, it has not always been harmonious. Medical
