Eliot Freidson, who died December 14 at 82, was a New York University professor and a leading sociologist of medicine and practitioner of the specialty known as sociology of professions.

Freidson’s classic study, “Profession of Medicine” (1970), is considered “a landmark study in medical sociology,” according to the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and has been translated into four languages.

His education at the University of Chicago was interrupted by service in the Army during World War II, followed by an assignment with British intelligence, where he helped pinpoint the location of German radio transmitters for Allied bombers to target.

Inspired by the work of Chicago social scientists Robert Park, Robert Redfield, and Lloyd Warner, Freidson initially studied the effects of mass communication. He began researching the medical professions during a residency at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, in the mid-1950s.

Following three post-doctoral fellowships, Freidson accepted a professorship in sociology at the City College of New York in 1961. He moved to NYU in 1961, serving as chair of the sociology department from 1975-78.

In addition to nearly 100 journal articles, Freidson wrote 12 books, including “Doctoring Together: A Study of Professional Social Control” (1976); “Professional Powers” (1986); “Medical Work in America” (1989), and “Professionalism, the Third Logic” (2001). His work on professions concerned how they both shape and are influenced by the societies in which they develop.

Freidson received fellowships from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 1972, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. His death prevented the awarding of an honorary Ph.D. degree by Nottingham University in December of this year.

Freidson was an acute and dispassionate observer. Discussing the oversupply of physicians in the mid-1980s, he observed in the New York Times in 1986: “The squeeze is most likely to affect those specialties that are extremely lucrative, like cardio and orthopedic surgeons. People will be more likely to go into internal medicine and pediatrics.”

Ten years later, data from the National Resident Matching Program showed that a majority of medical school graduates selected the primary care fields of family practice, pediatrics, and internal medicine.

Eliot Freidson

Born February 20, 1923, in Boston; died December 14 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the Zen Hospice in San Francisco; he is survived by his wife Helen Giambruni, his children, Jane Freidson and Matthew Freidson, and four grandchildren. A third child, Oliver, died in 1976.