ABSTRACT
Among recognized medical specialties, family medicine is a rather recent addition to the map of medical careers. Taking American Medical Association approval as an index of institutionalization, family medicine is just about 10 years old. Its history and its current place within the profession of medicine link the emergence of this specialty to a collective assertion of concern with primary and continuing care but also to an attempt by certain status-deprived segments of medicine–largely from the struggling “general practice” sector–to claim new meaning, new vehicles, and new devices for upward mobility within the profession (Mauksch, 1974; Lewy, 1977). To some, family medicine represents a deliberate move towards a professionally and scientifically-based approach to the integration of health and illness, with a holistic view of the patient as an individual and as member of a family. This is, in fact, a radical challenge to the individualistic, biopathological disease-orientation of traditional medicine. To others, the emergence of Family Medicine has been primarily a reaffirmation of simple and basic humane interests in opposition to trends in a profession which has incurred lessened emphasis on human contact as price for gaining control over disease through technology and laboratory resources.
