Regional and Intellectual Influences

After dominating American sociology for the first third of the century, the University of Chicago yielded to the East Coast Ivy League Universities of Harvard and Columbia as the center of influence.’ Included was a change of focus from the field centered study of Chicago as an urban laboratory to European-based theory. The strength of the Midwestern research preference for positivism and data-based methods was by no means lost, but the paradigms of structural-functionalism and Marxist dialectical materialism now found distinctive American interpretations, heightened by the deep economic depression of the thirties and the events that anticipated the oncoming European war. At the same time and in similar ways, medical sociology groped for a distinctive voice. However, it was still too early for a collective, institutionalized identity. Medical sociology was represented by several outstanding individual scholars who, through theoretical and historical writing, placed their stamp on the work of the next generation. Their contributions were close in pattern to the parent field but found in the study of medical problems a rich empirical base. The history of medical sociology in this important formative stage, because it is so much the product of a small group of outstanding individuals, can be told through their biographies.

Epistemology · Functionalism (philosophy of mind) · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Historical Medical Research and Treatments · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Law