In this review article, we examine some of the conceptual contributions of sociology of health and illness over the past fifty years. Specifically, we focus on research dealing with medicalization, the management of stigma, research on adherence and compliance, and patient-doctor interaction. We show how these themes that originated within sociology, diffused in other disciplines. Sociology in Social Science and Medicine started as an applied research tradition but morphed into a robust, stand-alone social science tradition.

Medical sociology has always had a leading presence at Social Science and Medicine. The journal’s founder and first editor-in-chief, Peter McEwan, was a sociologist with a mission to build bridges in the interdisciplinary field of the social studies of medicine. The first article of the inaugural issue, appropriately, offered an account of how public health officials defined the beginning of life. The next editors-in-chief – Mildred Blaxter and Ellen Annandale – were also high-profile medical sociologists. Over time, the journal gained a reputation as a valued resource for both clinicians and social scientists. While some early work drew from sociological theories, more research addressed health services issues geared toward clinicians. The range of topics, however, spoke to a wide range of interests; in an early issue, articles covered professionalization, legal aspects of medicine, medical education, alternative medicine, epidemiology even a case report of “pathological love.” In a field that values inductive conceptualizations and sustained theoretical engagements, sociologists of health and illness provide innovative conceptual tools that define phenomena and then diffuse into other research disciplines. This cultural authority, or ability to define things the way they are (Starr, 1982), covers many influential concepts from Bourdieu’s social and cultural capital used to examine social inequities in health to patterns in patientdoctor interaction. Concepts jumpstarting research furher include the extensive tradition of capturing illness experiences using notions such as biographical disruption and illness narratives (Bury, 1982; Frank, 1995; Riessman, 1990) and research on the medical profession set out by Freidson (Freidson, 1970; Toth, 2015). There is the influential introduction and elaboration of the social model of disability (Albrecht & Devlieger, 1999; Verbrugge & Jette, 1994), and investigations of trust and uncertainty in health care interactions and medical training pioneered by Renée Fox (Fox, 1957; Whitmarsh et al., 2007). A large body of research also flows from the Foucauldian-inspired research on governmentality and surveillance medicine at both the population and individual level (Armstrong, 1995; Hammer & Burton-Jeangros, 2013), and the role diagnosis plays in health care encounters (Jutel & Nettleton, 2011). In this anniversary article reviewing 50 years of sociological scholarship in Social Science and Medicine, we highlight some of these conceptual bright spots. Our list is inspired by the highly-cited pioneering work done on central ideas in sociology of health and illness but it is inevitably partial and incomplete. It is also anachronistic, written from a contemporary perspective; an editor writing in, say, 1975 would likely include topics that have now been picked up by the journal’s current sub-specialties. For instance, much research on medical education, which McEwan saw as an enduring preoccupation for Social Science and Medicine, has morphed into its own subfield. The most striking difference with the past may be that in the UK medical sociology is overwhelmingly based on qualitative research while social epidemiology focuses on quantitative methods, but in the US both methodological families fall under the rubric of medical sociology. Social Science and Medicine, however, follows the British model. Most of the manuscripts processed by the medical sociology office are therefore overwhelmingly qualitative (Timmermans, 2013).