Search

This paper posits a working or tentative model of medical pluralism, a pattern in which multiple medical sub-systems co-exist, or what I term the Australian dominative medical system. I argue that whereas the Australian medical system with its various medical sub-systems was pluralistic, that is more or less on an equal footing, in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century it became a plural or dominative one in the sense that biomedicine came to clearly dominate other medical sub-systems. This paper also explores the growing interest of biomedicine and the Australian Government in complementary medicine to which Australians have increasingly turned over the course of the past three decades or so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the author's experience in becoming a medical sociologist before the field had become formalized. The contributions to medical sociology of sociologist Selden D. Bacon and physician and medical educator William R. Willard are described. The relationship of medical sociology to medical behavioral science, as experienced at the University of Kentucky, is discussed. Finally, the thesis of the author's 1957 paper on the nature and status of medical sociology is re-examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will present data from research on the Family Health Program in a low-income district of Natal, Brazil. Through an institutional ethnographic perspective at the three Family Health Units in the district, it has been possible to create a joint construction of knowledge where the following are evident: (1) the need to consider the limitations of the biomedical approach; (2) the naturalization of social inequities and the lack of agency of health care users; and (3) the need to reflect on unfair power relations being reproduced through hierarchical interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a revision of the address given upon receipt of the Leo G. Reeder Award for distinguished Scholarship in Medical Sociology. It was presented on August 19, 1987 to the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association during its annual meeting held in Chicago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]