ABSTRACT
Four decades ago, Robert Straus (1957) warned that sociologists ‘in’ medicine were behaving like chameleons, in danger of losing their identifying colours by overadaptation to medical environments. Whereas sociologists ‘of’ medicine made medicine the subject of social enquiry, examining its norms, power, professional dynamics and structure, sociologists ‘in’ medicine appeared to be in service to the medical profession, carrying out research within a framework of medical values and assumptions that were accepted uncritically. For example, sociologists investigated ways of making patients more compliant with physician orders rather than examining how those patients came to be viewed as ‘problems’ or developed knowledge designed to prevent behaviours defined as ‘pathological’ by medicine (e.g. extra-marital pregnancies or alcohol consumption) rather than asking how the profession of medicine became an institution for the social control of deviance.
