IJE vol.33 no.6 © International Epidemiological Association 2004; all rights reserved.
Book Review |
The Word as Scalpel: A History of Medical Sociology. Bloom SW. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 348, £16.99 (PB) ISBN: 0-19-514929-7
This is a scholarly historical study of medical sociology's 'institutional arrangements' rather than a history of ideas. Sam Bloom has been a well-placed insider in American medical sociological circles for 50 years: his first job was at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, on the project that eventually led to Robert Merton et al.'s Student Physician (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); he joined the teaching staff of a medical school in 1956 and has been a medical educator ever since, and for many years he was the principal administrative officer of the Section on Medical Sociology of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
The book contains a number of surprises for the casual reader. Thus, the first book entitled Medical Sociology was published back in 1909, and its author, James Warbasse, started a Section on Sociology in the American Public Health Association. Bloom also convincingly champions the cause of Bernhard Stern, a Marxist scholar at Columbia of whom this reviewer had never heard, as an alternative Father of Medical Sociology to the patrician Harvard physiologist L. J. Henderson. And he documents a surprising debate within the American Sociological Association in the 1950s about whether or not sociologists should have certification, like psychologists. More conventionally, he charts the critical and proactive role of, first, the Russell Sage Foundation (set up in 1907 by the widow of congressman and financier Sage with a gift of ten million dollars, the largest gift to philanthropy in the history of the world at that time) and, second, the National Institute of Mental Health in providing both training and research monies for medical sociology.
Non-American readers will notice the limited coverage of medical sociology outside America and occasional slip-ups: Sociology of Health & Illness is misnamed the British Journal of Medical Sociology. But these are small faults when America remains the fountainhead of the subdiscipline. Where Bloom attempts to chart the relationships between academic institutional arrangements and theoretical and policy developments, the book is rather uneven. Bloom is instructive on how the early fertile research collaboration between sociology and psychiatry withered with the advance of new pharmacological treatments but is a less valuable guide to more recent puzzling failures of sociological influence: for example, why is it that, with 1100 members in the Medical Sociology Section of ASA, syringe exchange schemes failed to get established in the USA? There is more to be written here from the perspective of the sociology of scientific knowledge.
But it would be wholly inappropriate to end this review on a critical note. In what has clearly been a labour of love, Sam Bloom has done a great deal of original research both in archives and in interviews with key figures in the emergence of the subdiscipline. The book will remain the essential historical resource on this topic, and his fellow medical sociologists owe Bloom a debt of gratitude.
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