Research Agenda in Medical Sociology

Sociology queries taken for granted understandings of the world and especially those that claim universal applicability, but that in fact support particular interests. In showing up the hidden workings of power – the interests of institutions, professions, corporations, and capital – the complex set of interests that make up modern medicine can be explored to disrupt simplistic accounts of its beneficence. By seeing health and illness as social as well as individual bodily processes, and conceptualizing medicine as a practice and profession that is entangled with governance and speculative capital, sociology offers critical insights to medicine’s curative and therapeutic benefits (Bradby, 2012). The challenge for a progressive sociology of medicine is to critique the range of interests that make up medicine (as profession, discipline, business, statutory, and non-governmental institution across the world) while holding a sense of medicine’s benefits and deficits at individual and population level in balance with other knowledge systems and moralities of healing.