the Sociology of Health and Medicine in australia

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the development and institutionalisation of the sociology of health and medicine in Australia. As a former British colony, sociology was primarily brought into the country with its British and European migrants, and developed in a series of six discrete stages: the formative years of the Colonial period and early decades after Federation; the period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration in the 1950s and early 60s; a stage of intensification and organisation from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s; the years of institutional growth and specialisation in the 1980s; a decade of both consolidation and fragmentation during the 1990s; and, in the first ten years of the new century, a time of internationalisation. The evidence suggests the formation and growth of the sociology of health and medicine has closely followed the developmental trajectory of the parent discipline, but unlike the latter, has more permeable disciplinary boundaries.