The Theoretical Origins and Development of the Sociology of Health and Illness - Medical Science Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Task:

The sociology of health and illness has had a vexed relationship with social theory almost since its inception. A glance at any review of the field will usually make clear that its research is undertheorized and that its scholarship is marginalized from the 'mainstream' and, consequently, of little relevance to social theorists. Yet, curiously, there seems to be a
change in the air as the insights of the field find their way ever more frequently into broader sociological debates, largely because of the shifting terrain of social theory itself. As we will see in the course of the first three chapters, mainstream sociological theories grew out of the Enlightenment, an eighteenth- century movement based on notions of progress through the applica- tion of reason and rationality. While concerns with health and the body are nascent in classical social theory, the Enlightenment legacy has meant that the actions of individuals have been seen as synonymous with conscious, rational activity. The die was cast for the sociology of health and illness in significant ways. Most importantly, issues of health, illness and the body were not part of the explicit remit of early sociology which, in the work of Emile Durkheim in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, was founded upon a distinction from the natural sciences. As Shilling (1993: 25) writes, 'this view had an enduring effect upon sociology and meant that the natural and the
biological were frequently ruled outside of, and unimportant to, the sociologist's legitimate sphere of investigation' which was based firmly upon social factors. Ironically, the sub-field of the sociology of health and illness was cast adrift, clinging to the net of the social itself, turning away from the physical body, sometimes concentrating upon the mean-
ing of illness at the expense of bodily experience. The tide, however, seems to be turning. As wider social theory takes ever more notice of the embodied nature of experience in, for example, concerns about individual reflexivity and risk in contemporary society, the sociology of health and illness seems ever more relevant to the wider sociological endeavour.

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