Putting the Family Back in Medical Education

Abstract

SIGERIST has described the function of medicine as follows:The task of medicine is to promote health, to prevent disease, to treat the sick when prevention has broken down and to rehabilitate people after they have been cured. These are highly social functions and we must look at medicine as basically a social science — one link in a chain of social welfare institutions that every civilized country must develop. If we have a maladjustment today, it is to a large extent due to the fact that we have neglected the sociology of medicine. The technology of medicine has outrun . . .