The Death of the Sick Role

The concept of the sick role was introduced into sociology in 1951 and was widely used in medical sociology. A sick person at that time would assume a special social role that permitted him or her to deviate from his or her normal social roles. Historians came to utilise the idea of the sick role as well. It was useful to describe social behaviour and expectations for the mid-century period and centuries before, but at the end of the twentieth century, the actualities of illness and medicine made the concept less applicable to that recent time period. The fact that this standard concept no longer applied signalled the advent of a new epoch in the history of medicine around the turn of the twenty-first century.