ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how medical sociology came into existence through the convergence of two branches of learning (medicine and sociology) with very different histories and orientations. Neither the most important classical theorists in sociology (Durkheim, Weber, and Marx) nor its neglected founders (Martineau, Gilman, and Du Bois) established medical sociology. Instead, the chapter shows the origin of the field was in medicine where various physicians (Virchow, Grotjahn, McIntire, Blackwell, and others) initiated discussions about the need for medical sociology, wrote about it, and named it before sociology adopted it as a subdiscipline.