title: Simmel's dynamic social medicine: new questions for studying medical institutions?
abstract: Over the last half century, changes in the structure of medicine have shifted the relationship between the profession of medicine and social institutions. In this paper, I uncover ideas for retheorizing this relationship by analyzing a review by Georg Simmel that has been previously overlooked. In an analytical overview and critical appraisal of Simmel's text, I argue that he considered preventative medical knowledge more influential when this knowledge is located outside the physician-patient relationship. Simmel suggests we need to identify how such knowledge is injected into medical and non-medical settings by the mixtures of professional-, market-, and state-based institutions governing medicine, and pay attention to how these institutions shift. His goals show continuity with a social medicine movement in Germany previously thought to be stalled, and are unique too in their focus on targeting institutions over individuals. Through a close analysis of Simmel's ideas, we can see the relationship of public health with social structural studies of medicine in theoretically innovative ways.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, 919 East Shaw Lane, Rm E-35, East Lansing, MI 48825, USA. Electronic address: mench@msu.edu.
authors.forename: Daniel A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Menchik
mesh_terms: D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011315:Preventive Medicine; D012196:Review Literature as Topic; D012936:Social Medicine / Q000458:organization & administration*
keywords: Institutions; Knowledge; Macrosociology; Medical sociology; Theory