First Steps toward Social Identity

The substantial intellectual and methodological foundations for a sociology of medicine that had accumulated by 1940 did not immediately spawn an identifiable special field. Even the name “medical sociology,” in spite of its appearance at the end of the nineteenth century, disappeared, and exactly when it surfaced again is obscure. Nevertheless, the subject matter began to be taught, in the thirties by Bernhard Stern at Columbia, in the early 1940s at the University of Chicago by Everett Hughes and by Leo Simmons at Yale. Research on medical problems was part of the generally enhanced role of sociologists in the Second World War, and several of the field’s outstanding pioneers trace their entry into medical sociology to wartime research.

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