The interdisciplinary curriculum: from social medicine to postmodernism

Academic specialisation has often been criticised, because it brings about a narrow and partial orientation to research and teaching. Hence interdisciplinarity often appears to be a positive and alternative framework for the progressive reorganisation of higher education curricula. This paper examines various aspects of the development of interdisciplinarity in relation to the medical curriculum, locating these changes in the social context of the development of scientific medicine. These interdisciplinary perspectives are illustrated by an examination of four cases (social medicine, sociology of health and illness, the interdisciplinary research centre, and the postmodern melange) which necessarily imply some critical appraisal of the medical profession and its status in society, because they implicitly or explicitly suggest new approaches to the medical curriculum. However, these four examples indicate that the notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ covers a variety of very different perspectives on curriculum reform in higher education. Social medicine and the sociology of health and illness have been typically critical evaluations of monodisciplinary assumptions about medical intervention and medical training. By contrast, the research centre orientation, which followed the Rothschild Report, has been primarily a response to financial constraints. The development of postmodernism in social theory has also involved a challenge to the unitary assumptions of monodisciplinarity, but there may be a convergence between the commercialisation of medicine and the emergence of postmodernistic criticism of the conventional medical curriculum, in which case interdisciplinarity will produce a fragmentary pastiche of disciplines rather than intellectual integration.