ABSTRACT
Sociologists have typically viewed sickness as a form of deviant behavior. This view was initially formulated by Talcott Parsons (1951) in his concept of the sick role, which describes the normative behavior a person typically adopts when feeling sick. Parsons saw being sick as a disturbance in the "normal" condition of the human being, both biologically and socially. Previously, the sociological study of health and illness had relied on a medical perspective in which efforts in studying sickness were limited to correlating social factors with biological factors-based on references provided by health practitioners. This medically oriented approach emphasized the physiological reality of the human organism but neglected the sociological reality that a person is sick when he or she acts sick.
