Over the past several decades medical sociology has become a major subdiscipline of sociology, at the same time assuming an increasingly conspicuous role in health care disciplines such as public health, health care management, nursing, and clinical medicine. The name medical sociology garners immediate recognition and legitimacy and, thus, continues to be widely used—for instance, to designate the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association—even though most scholars in the area concede that the term is narrow and misleading. Many courses and texts, rather than using the term "sociology of medicine," refer instead to the sociology of health, health and health care, health and illness, health and medicine, or health and healing. The study of medicine is only part of the sociological study of health and health care, a broad field ranging from (1) social epidemiology, the study of socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioral factors...