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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]

This article presents an essay on medical sociology in Great Britain. Medical sociology is much more fun to do than to read or write about. Although there are socially approved places for both activities, they can be done anywhere and neither needs expensive equipment. If they must be enjoyed through the printed word rather than at first hand, personal memoirs seem generally preferred to how-to-do-it manuals, while accounts of changing forms and fashions or of cross-cultural variations attract only the most dedicated devotees. An alternative approach would have been to examine British medical sociology in comparison with European and North American developments. However Lisbeth Claus's recently published account of medical sociology in Europe has explored differences and similarities in much more detail than could be attempted here and several other authors have reviewed the field within the last decade. Medical sociologists are doubly alienated, for not only do they share this unease about the validity of experience, but they inhabit the interstices between the citadel of medicine and the suburb of sociology.