Abstract
When we look back at the sociological studies relating to medical and health areas research that has been done by professional sociologists occured only after the period of World War II. This is the case even in America where the sociological field is well developed.
But if we consider them as the studies that treated health and disease in relation to social factors, we can trace them back to the sixteen century of the western world. After that period, topics like occupational diseases or social environment have been studied by some physicians and social reformers and so on.
So in this paper, I review the developments of these studies by deviding them into two areas ; that is one is from medicine that has expanded its interest to. social factors, the other is from sociology that has developed its interst into health and medical area.
The reason why medicine came to join the field of sociology was due to the change of disease patterns and medical practitioners coming to accept sociologists as an assistants to analyse the social factors. Contrary to this, sociology began to have interest in the medical area mainly because social factors of disease have acquired a greater importance and also sociologists intended to use the medical area as the test field for their theories.
Nevertheless, if we wish to realise the real effective cooperation between medicine and sociology, we should concentrate our aim to the solutions of health and disease problem, not to make use of other dicipline only as a tool or stick to our own dicipline.
In Japan so far, medical theories have been limited to biological aspect to catch up to the more advanced Western Medicine. Also sociology in Japan, so far, has attached no importance to empirical and practical studies.
But the situation has begun to change little by little as actual conditions of health and disease in Japan came to be more related with social factors.
