This paper presents a comparative study on medical sociology in France and Brazil by means of exchanges and discussions among Brazilian and French sociologists who share mutual interests in medical sociology studies and in the sociological approach of Pierre Bourdieu. This manuscript contains a reflection on the status of medical sociology based on a literature review of the scientific French, North American, British and Brazilian production. Using published papers on the medical field, we sought to clarify the specific ways in which health, disease and medicine are approached in both countries; to discern their historical particularities; and to outline the relations between sociology of health and sociology in the broad sense of the word. We observed a confluence of factors, such as the basis of the formation of medical sociology in France as well as in Brazil: a reforming social project developed by public health doctors, a project developed by social sciences professors to institutionalize the discipline in medical schools, and a conservative reformulation of education during authoritarian governments.
Medical Sociology; Sociology of Health; Social Medicine; Pierre Bourdieu; Field
