The mission of social history of medicine: an historical view.

This paper analyses the shift in the Society for the Social History of Medicine from public health professionals to full-blooded approaches drawn from social history. The Bulletin of the Society reflected its vigorous interdisciplinary meetings programme: during the 1980s this matured into a fully fledged Journal and a monographs series as the Society took a crucial role in delivering the disciplinary functions of the history of medicicine.