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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2007; all rights reserved.
Fifty years of JN Morris's Uses of Epidemiology
Institute of Education, Social Science Research Unit, 18 Woburn Square, London WC1H ONR, UK, E-mail: A.Oakley@ioe.ac.uk
Accepted 3 September 2007
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Much that health researchers take for granted today has a recent intellectual history. Despite the incursions of people such as William Farr and John Snow into the murky provenance of vital statistics, the promise of ecological studies of disease, clinical medicine and the infant study of health and illness in their social context were firmly divided occupations until the 1940s in Britain. Doctors practiced medicine, and other people (social workers? sociologists? socialists?—anything with a ‘soc’ in it) dabbled in the much softer business of relating the behaviour of human bodies to their social environments. The emerging art of social medicine, later, medical sociology and, later still, the sociology of