The Trend and Prospect of Medical Sociology: Its Concepts and the Interface with Medical History

Abstract

Medical sociology has a long history, and it has been institutionalized and developed since the 1940s. This paper is about the history, trends, and prospects of medical sociology from the perspective of concepts as well as its interface with medical humanities. Sociology is a discipline that conceptualizes and theorizes social phenomena on the basis of collected data to best understand them. For this reason, we think that one of the best ways to understand medical sociology is to track the changes and developments in the concept and theory of medical sociology over time. Moreover, the development of concepts and theories does not occur only within the discussion of experts but also actively in interactions with the institutional position of medical sociology, medical knowledge and institutions and society. By reflecting on the changes in the theory and concept of medical sociology over the past 70 years from the 1950s to the present, we were able to understand the changes in research interests and research subject of medical sociology. Medical sociology has developed in response to the needs of the medical community and society. On the one hand, it developed a diverse understanding of healthcare, one of the key elements of the structure and culture of modern society, and on the other hand, it developed an understanding of how each individual experiences medical care as a dominant power. Since the 1990s, these seemingly conflicting two areas integrated into one through research subjects such as the growth of the general population and the health and social movement. Furthermore, the emergence of biotechnology, which began to develop in earnest beginning in the 1980s, presented a challenge for medical sociology. If the role of Parsons in the 1950s was to reflect the American medical system based on bacteriology and therapeutic drugs, after the 1960s, chronic disease became an important health problem due to changes in American society, and the experiences of patients suffering from chronic diseases became an important research subject. However, the rapid development of biotechnology from the 1980s was powerful enough to change the way we perceive our bodies. Our society has regarded our body as a sum of cells and a combination of various organs and body parts since the birth of modern medicine, but with the development of biotechnology, including genetics, we began to recognize our body as an expression of information contained in genes. The capitalist force driving biotechnology has degraded our bodies to the extent of our resources for the accumulation of genomic information. Finally, the concepts and theories developed by medical sociology can also be applied to understand the trends of medical history in the Korean Journal of Medical History provided that medical sociology and the medical history were embedded in the particular Korean historical context. Therefore, we hope these two medical disciplines cooperate further on the medical issues in Korea.

Keywords: Human and Social Science of Medicine; Medical History; Social History of Medicine; Sociology of Health; Medical Sociology.