Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Dorothy Porter -- Milton C. Winternitz and the Yale Institute of Human Relations: A Brief Chapter in the History of Social Medicine / Arthur J. Viseltear -- Training Doctors for the National Health Service: Social Medicine, Medical Education and the GMC 1936–48 / Nigel Oswald -- Making Medicine Social: The Case of the Two Dogs with Bent Legs / Ann Oakley -- The Decline of Social Medicine in Britain in the 1960s / Dorothy Porter -- Social Medicine and Medical Sociology 1950–1970: The Testimony of a Partisan Participant / Margot Jefferys -- The Dilemma of Social Pathology / Uta Gerhardt -- The Social Space of Illness / David Armstrong -- Medicine, Diet and Moral Regulation: Foucault's Impact on Medical Sociology / Bryan S. Turner -- Index / Dorothy Porter -- Back Matter / Dorothy Porter.

Little attention has been paid to the history of the influence of the social sciences upon medical thinking and practice in the twentieth century. The essays in this volume explore the consequences of the interaction between medicine and social science by evaluating its significance for the moral and aterial role of medicine in modern societies. Some of the essays examine the ideas of both clinicians and social scientists who believed that highly technologized medicine could be made more humanistic by understanding the social relations of health and illness. Other authors interrogate the critical assault which social science has made upon medicine as a system of knowledge, organisation and power. The volume discusses, therefore, the relationship between social-scientific knowledge both in and of medicine in the twentieth century. Collectively the essays illustrate that the respective power of biology and culture in determining human behaviour and social transition continues to be an unresolved paradox.

Description based on print version record.