Before involvement--some questions for the attention of medical sociologists.

Increasingly, it is being suggested that the behavioural sciences can contribute to medical education and should be incorporated into the medical curriculum. Evidence for the development of this general viewpoint can be found in the recommendations of the recent Royal Commission on Medical Education and the submissions of various bodies to it. It is perhaps truistic to point out that there has also been a phenomenal expansion in research and teaching in the behavioural sciences themselves. Although not directly related to medicine, advances in such areas as, for example, the sociology and psychology of education, industry, organizations and deviance have been seen to have applicability to problems within the field of medicine. However, despite the widespread view that the behavioural sciences can contribute meaningfully to medical education and the fact that they are favourably regarded by most medical educators, there still remains in certain quarters, especially in Great Britain, some apprehension that the invasion of 'basic science time' may constitute a regressive movement in medical education. It has, for example, been suggested that training in the behavioural sciences is an attempt to prepare doctors to achieve utopian goals and that anyway their incorporation into the medical curriculum is of doubtful value at present because they have not reached a definitive maturity which can find tangible application to medicine (Loeb, 1955). Others, perhaps naively, view the incorporation of 'behavioural science' into medical training as an attempt to dilute the medical curriculum, by sending students prematurely into patients' homes in an attempt to foster some feeling of social responsibility (Atchley, 1957). Still others have suggested that