Thanks to three scholarly developments—the emergence of France's Annales School of historiography in the 1930s, the rise of the sociology of medicine in the 1940s, the appearance of the anthropology of medicine in the 1960s—the 1970s gave rise to the social history of disease. In recent years this branch of the history of medicine has won adherents around the world. The novelty of the social history of disease lies in a new paradigm that integrates medical history with social history. This synthesis between internal history and external history also involves an ontological synthesis: the integration of its dual attributes (biological and sociological) frames disease as a hybrid of nature and society.
