The History of the Medical Model
PM Strong was one of the first in this field to talk about how doctors hate referring to only one medical model.
What is medical sociology?
This is another name for the medical model.
What is the biomedical model?
This subfield of sociology explores science as an institution and regularly gets into epistemological fights.
What is the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK)?
The whole point of this is that meanings and experiences of illness are shaped by our social contexts.
What is social constructionism?
The concept of "lay knowledge" was developed as a critical response to this literature in the 1970s.
What is the "lay belief" literature?
It was in this century that doctors and anatomists were finally able to legally dissect humans, and therefore establish the idea of specific diseases having specific causes.
What is the 19th century?
In the medical model, they are often seen as the "mechanics," going in and fixing whatever is broken.
Who are physicians?
Berger & Luckmann define this as "a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot 'wish them away')".
What is reality?
Pure or naive social constructionists don't actually care if this "really exists," they only care what people think about it.
What is illness?
Maguire & Britten worry that top-down efforts to improve health knowledge could be akin to this historical phenomenon as long as professionals' knowledge is privileged over that of patients.
What is colonization?
It was the 1880s when this field began to show that micro-organisms were responsible for specific diseases.
What is bacteriology?
This is the medical term for the specific cause (or set of causes) for a disease. For example, COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
What is etiology (or aetiology)?
The sociology of scientific knowledge challenges this classical view of scientific knowledge which argues that the truth is out there and we can discover it if we study the natural world well enough.
What is positivism?
This arose when social constructionism started being applied to science, and not just everyday phenomena.
What are the science wars?
This queen of lay knowledge research initially laid out the argument that lay knowledge was not just "primitive" residuals clogging up otherwise scientific societies.
Who is Claudine Herzlich?
This 19th century classic of English literature is about a "reforming medical man," and demonstrates how the medical model was tied to modern social and political reform.
What is Middlemarch?
According to the medical model, these are caused by disease agents (germs, viruses, etc.) causing legions in the body, altering its anatomy.
What are symptoms?
This is the approach that the sociology of scientific knowledge takes--as opposed to positivism. For example, SSK focuses on how scientific knowledge changes based on cultural context and standpoint.
What is relativism?
Nicolson & McLaughlin's classic study on this disease found that new medical knowledge gets filtered through existing beliefs and theories, which gives experts considerable flexibility in interpreting the same body of information.
What is multiple sclerosis (MS)?
For the last thirty years or so, medical sociologists have been as interested in lay knowledge about this, not just lay knowledge about health and illness.
What is risk (or health risks)?
This British physician and medical historian famously showed that mortality due to infections was already falling before each major germ (and resulting treatment) was discovered, suggesting that it was public hygiene and better living conditions--not medicine--saving lives.
Who is Thomas McKeown?
The medical model changed doctor-patient relationships by forcing physicians to do what with their patients, and then check these to classifications.
What is talking to them about their symptoms?
This "agnostic" principle is meant to keep the sociology of scientific knowledge objective, and relies on studying scientific knowledge like all other forms of socially-produced knowledge.
What is "methodological relativism?"
Mayes & Horwitz famously showed how the history of this book reflects more social factors (like a legitimacy crisis in psychiatry) than any new knowledge.
What is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III)?
This arguably becomes a form of "civic intelligence" when lay people take on scientists and other experts. The Erin Brockovich story is a famous example of a non-expert making a connection between something in the environment and illness, and then taking action to do something about it.
What is popular epidemiology?