The contribution of Professor Bruno Latour to the sociology of health and illness: 1947–2022

Bruno Latour was a prolific writer and commentator. His work ranged from questioning the status of the scientific fact (Latour & Woolgar, 1979) to considering how Pasteur’s work came about (Latour, 1993) to discussing the status of theory and exploring how we come to love technology (Latour, 1996), and then most recently to considering both the law and the environment as ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004a) and ‘modes of existence’ (Latour, 2011). Although he never published in Sociology of Health and Illness (SHI) himself, his work has been influential in different strands of work across the field and I offer a brief overview of this influence here. Though I look for papers across the journal, I’ll make special mention of the small number that cite his name as a keyword to illustrate the argument. The first use of Latour is in a paper by Dodier and Camus (2001) on dealing with patients in a hospital emergency service. They draw on Dingwall and Murray (1983) both to ground their approach and later to talk about the limitations of previous work. For example, they also cite Jeffery (1979) on ‘good and bad’ patients, but to illustrate their point that ‘trivia, drunks, overdoses, tramps—but also nutcases, smelly, dirty, obese patients’ are not the same (p. 416). In concluding they suggest that references to specialism vary depending on the closeness of the case to an emergency—depending very much on the relationship of a specific doctor and specific patient—and on the case’s intellectual interest (p. 439). Some in emergency services respond to social demands, some do not, so the openness and specialisation of the emergency department is contested (e.g. France is good at mobilising) (Jeffery, 1979). Finally, they note that their ethnographic and comparative work help identify a ‘complex web of relationships built up between the people responsible for treatment’, (p. 440) which creates the accessibility of services for patients facing alcohol or drug addiction or malarial rash or an infarction. For those who have come to sociology from Foucault, this was a powerful invitation to learn more about the field through Bruno Latour’s eyes, using his discussion of ‘the discovery of networks’ (Latour, 1987). ‘Speaking of her new study on sheep, [Thelma Rowell] stated one of her “biases” in the following way: “I tried to give my sheep the opportunity to behave like chimps, not that I believe that they would be like chimps, but because I am sure that if you take sheep for boring sheep by opposition to intelligent chimps they would not have a chance”… By importing the notion of intelligent behaviour from a “charismatic animal”… she might modify, subvert, elicit, in the understanding of sheep behaviour features that were until then invisible… It is because she artificially and willingly imposes on sheep another resource coming from elsewhere that “they could have a chance” to behave intelligently’ (Latour, 2000: 372). She went on to argue that Latour argues using ‘generous constraints’ on objects, including sheep, so that they and others were able to perform actions without necessarily being assumed to have autonomy. For her, drug users were made up of a ‘temporary association of actants’—varying in time and space (Gomart, 2002, p. 529) in which ‘functional use’ defines both ‘drug’ and ‘subject’ Bijker and Law (1992). ‘An experiment shifts out action from one frame of reference to another. Who is the active force in this experiment? Both Pasteur and his yeast. More precisely, Pasteur acts so that the yeast acts alone. (…) Pasteur creates a stage in which he does not have to create anything. He develops gestures, glasswork, protocols, so that the entity, once shifted out, becomes independent and autonomous.’ One year later, Will also used Latour and Woolgar (1979)’s to locate her paper on risk assessment techniques (Will, 2005), which discussed them as ‘inscription devices’ that created the science of cardiovascular disease and risk in different ways, combining this with the more sustained work of Berg (1992) on medical technology and ‘improvements’. A similar approach had also been used by Prout et al. (1999) in their work on everyday medication and its use to allow ‘the maintenance of ordinariness’ in the home. ‘Further, as Bruno Latour (1992) has argued [the author of The Design of Everyday Things] “Norman speaks only about dysfunction in the interfaces with the final user and never considers the shaping of the artefact by the engineers themselves” (1992: 257n14). For Latour – and science and technology studies (STS) research more generally – engineers and (cognitive psychologists) ought to be considered as part of the system, rather than observers capable of analysing and optimising it from the outside. To balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive attention away from humans and look also at nonhumans. Here they are, the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality. They knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the nineteenth century. In the same year, Hout et al. (2015) use Latour’s name to ground their interest in materiality, citing Latour (1987, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2004b) to argue that Latour saw things as ‘actants’, counterposed to human ‘actors’, and argued that technologies, just as much as humans, deserved attention from social sciences (Hout et al., 2015, p. 1208). This was properly developed in their discussion of the materiality of telecare as a form of concern. Four years later, Bilodeau et al. (2019) cite Latour (2005) to discuss the concept of ‘actor-network-theory’ in their work on intersectoral action on local neighbourhood. It is the state of the nineteenth century and so- called biopower … the state of what is rightly called statistics: population management on a territorial grid seen from above and led by the power of experts. This is exactly what we see resurrected today – with the only difference that it is replicated from one nation to the next, to the point of having become world-wide… [W]e are collectively playing a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture. Rabi uses this observation to frame his discussion of coronavirus as normalised and encapsulated in the Israeli response to the pandemic. Coming right up to date, two papers in 2022 reference Latour to talk about hepatitis C. One makes a point in relation to the law, where the law counts as ‘legal verification’ (2009, 2013), as described in Seear et al. (2022). The other draws on Latour (2004b) to describe the processes of making hepatitis C through ‘social and material relations’ (Farrugia et al., 2022) citing Farrugia et al. (2019) on the ways in which diagnosis happens through a gathering of elements, social and material. What have we learned here? One thing that’s impossible to ignore is the sheer range of areas that Latour covered in his lifetime and the influence his work has had across a number of fields. In the sociology of health, illness and medicine, his work is drawn upon to discuss topics as diverse as bike repair, emergency services, hormones, different diseases and addiction. These are also made to relate to a wondrously inventive range of concepts: socio-technical networks, materiality, hormones and drugs, biopolitics, law, technology and care—very often with assistance from his trusty translator, Catherine Porter. Latour may not have called himself a medical sociologist at any point, and his point of reference was very often anthropology or his own reason, but he has contributed an interest in ethnography and many different theoretical concepts to our field and participated in founding STS as a lively cross-disciplinary area. We hope you can use this editorial—and the papers we have opened—to find out more.