Negalios sampratos kaita medicininėje sociologijoje
The shift of the Conception of Disability in Medical Sociology

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the context of emerging disability studies in medical sociology, their development trends and tendencies of change from the last century to the present day sociological thought. As medical sociology is a branch of common sociology, the concept of disability evolved along with the change in sociological thought. The paradigm of structural functionalism was dominant in the middle of the last century so disability was perceived in the light of positivistic thought. Along with the increasing influence of interpretative current, sociological research of disability took on a new character. Finally in the last decade of XX century, with tendency in sociology to “bring the body back in”, medical sociology took an opportunity to develop the concept of phenomenological disability, where individual’s subjectively lived body comes to the centre of attention, while disability is not any more considered as a simple disorder of instrumental body, but rather as radical intrusion into the whole embodied person.

• Details
• Contents