Study of medical practices : the framework of the sociology of professions

Abstract

The sociology of medicine is constituted from the model of the American sociology of professions, which has emerged in the 1930s (a model that has also marked the historians of medicine). This article traces the context in which the sociology of professions emerged and later became institutionalized in the United States, notably from the works by Talcott Parsons, Everett Hughes and Eliot Freidson. Even now, questionings about medical practices are strongly influenced by these authors, while the sociology of professions include debated and debatable postulates and important blind spots, such as the link between State and medicine.