The 'Sick Role' Revisited

I N A SERIES of papers from 1951 to 1958, Talcott Parsons developed his concept of the sick role.' Since that time, medical sociologists have found this a useful formulation, and a fairly extensive literature has grown up around it.2 However, the fact that it is an ideal concept has given rise to a problem, which Freidson has noted: when one goes to examine actual cases of occupancy of the sick role, they rarely correspond with this ideal.3 This tends to cast doubt on the usefulness of the con-