Origins and canons: medicine and the history of sociology

Abstract

Differing accounts are conventionally given of the origins of medical sociology and its parent discipline of sociology. These distinct ‘histories’ are justified on the basis that the sociological founders were uninterested in medicine, mortality and disease. This article challenges these ‘constructions’ of the past, proposing the theorization of health not as a ‘late development of sociology’ but an integral part of its formation. Drawing on a selection of key sociological texts, it is argued that evidence of the founders’ sustained interest in the infirmities of the individual, of mortality, and in medicine, have been expunged from the historical record through processes of ‘canonization’ and ‘medicalization’.