ABSTRACT
This chapter examines developments in both epidemiology and sociology that have led to a certain dissolution of the partnership, exacerbated, perhaps, by the increasing importance of a medical background for the epidemiologist and the lack of psychiatrists working with or as anthropologists or sociologists. One of the most famous of sociological texts, it is also a forerunner of epidemiological psychiatry. The partnership between epidemiologist and sociologist was also healthy for another reason: there was a certain division of labour based on an acceptance of the different expertise each discipline brought to the enquiry. Epidemiology is a branch of medicine, and, thus, the assumptions of the medical model of disease are implicit. Epidemiology, to be taken at all seriously and to obtain resources and maintain precarious funding, had, like medicine itself to turn away from its humanistic past and follow a model of ‘hard science’. R. Littlewood argues that not only should psychiatry apply social anthropology, but apply it to itself.
