ABSTRACT
128The medical sociologist with an interest in the nature of day-to-day medical categorisation finds himself immediately confronted with the widely prevalent notion that the practice of medicine depends on the specialised knowledge of medical personnel. His colleagues concerned with the study of professions often mention such a body of knowledge as one of the prime attributes of any professional group, 1 and the recent Merrison Report (1975) provides an illustration of how medical administrators sometimes share this kind of idea, when it states that ‘the essential character of a profession is that the members of it have specialised knowledge and skills which the public will wish to use’.
