The social sciences and health: a diverse and changing theoretical field

Abstract

The article examines the creation of the social science and health subdiscipline from the time of its pioneers in the early 19th Century, discusses the formation of the theoretical field in the mid-20th Century, and describes its three basic approaches: explanation of the medical dimension by the social one and explanation of disease by social conditions, with two variants - the individualist perspective and the structural-collective one. It concludes with a discussion of the type of linkage that should exist between the social sciences and health, as a basis for the creation of a new theoretical field called the social science of health.