ABSTRACT
This chapter offers social scientists and health professionals and the ways in which society has been conceptualized and how we might utilize the concept moving forward. It demonstrates that how society has been taken up by social scientists, the relationships between these positions, and their promise and shows how a particular vision of the social has been employed in the field of public health, which is both partial and problematic. Among others, the chapter also draws from the writings of mile Durkheim at the end of the nineteenth century, whose work offers an anchor point as a whole. These concerns coalesce with the kinds of questions health professionals more commonly ask about the social patterning of health inequalities, the meanings and actions of individuals, and how medicine, technology and healthcare impact the contemporary experience of health and illness, with stillbirth used as a case study to tease out the present-day utility of society as a conceptual resource.
