Conclusion
Over time, sociological research in Social Science and Medicine has transformed from a collection of studies highlighting the social aspects of medical care in pursuit of better health care into a stand-alone body of scholarship exploring how health and illness affect people’s lives – at any stage of the life-course, and at both individual and collective levels. Even if health care is one focus of contemporary sociological research, sociologists tend to decenter the physician’s gaze as the primordial authoritative point of view and instead recover the voices of patients, families, and communities. At the core of much sociological research are the existential issues of living when body or mind break down and when social networks are shocked or disturbed. Many ideas that began as medical sociology have, little by little, been picked up by other disciplines. The conceptual, methodological, and theoretical contributions have found their way not simply into the sister offices of the journal, but also into allied fields such as bioethics, nursing research, and patient counseling. In the context of a rapidly shifting health care system, growing inequalities in mortality and morbidity, and a flurry of different financial incentives that render care profitable, much work remains to be done.
