The Making of History of Medical Sociology

Medical sociology, in its nineteenth-century origins, derived from three overlapping concepts, medicine as social science, social medicine, and the sociology of medicine. All three are concerned with explaining the linkage between social conditions and medical problems, the idea that human diseases is always medicated and modified by social activities and the cultural environment. Medicine is a social science, wrote Rudolph Virchow in 1848. Even earlier, French and German investigators used similar terms as they became concerned with the social problems of industrialization. The French social hygienists of the 1830s are one example, and, in Germany, another well-known physician, Salomon Neumann, studying the influence of poverty and occupation on the state of health, shared Virchow’s view.