Many of you may have heard the sad news that Catherine Will, Professor of the Sociology of Science and Technology at the University of Sussex, died on Monday, August 12, 2024. Catherine was a dedicated member of the medical sociology community and a founding editor of the BSA “Cost of Living” blog. During her time on the blog, she actively participated in the editorial collective and contributed numerous articles on a wide range of topics. We will miss her greatly.

To mark her contribution, we felt it fitting to offer a short selection of the many articles she contributed to the blog. She did so much more than this for the blog, and we wanted to take this opportunity to mark her contribution to the blog and to medical sociology. We offer this abridged anthology as a testament to her contribution to the discipline.

To see the original blog posts, please click on the titles below.

To commemorate the life and work of Catherine Will, a group of her friends and colleagues are organising a day of celebration on 14 April 2025 at the University of Sussex.  More details below at the end of the post.

Allergy… Really?

Catherine here reflects on taking her daughter to her general practice and how a potential antibiotic allergy was thoughtfully handled. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s work about how technologies should be read as texts, she reminds us that material artefacts mean different things to different people:

An allergy is often conceived of as a bad thing, but in practice it’s the relationship not the thing that is bad.

Cancer during COVID

With Ulla McKnight

Here, Catherine draws together her experiences of running a research project while also receiving a cancer diagnosis, all against the backdrop of the unfurling COVID-19 pandemic.

To sum up then, my positionality as a white researcher of medical technologies and processes makes me acutely aware that the outcome of my disease is entirely connected to the healthscapes that determine what my cancer may become. These do not include the experience of racism, insecure migratory status or access to free expert care. I am not the most likely to suffer from inequality in cancer or other forms of care, Yet the cancer care I have received results if anything with potential under-treatment. In these circumstances, access to trials and indeed to relatively normal care has not always felt straightforward.

The NHS: To Provide All People

This review by Catherine of a BBC programme celebrating the 70th anniversary of the NHS

Whilst at time sentimental, recent BBC film poem about the National Health Service raised important issues about the relevance of sociology and sociological research in context of contemporary healthcare.

When should we worry?

In this article, Catherine analysed a public health campaign to educate the public about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and found that these messages are often contradictory:

As so often when lay people confront medicine and public health, we have to walk a tightrope between worrying too little and too much, a predicament Sue Ziebland and colleagues have called ‘the Goldilocks zone’. Meanwhile I worry that campaigns risk generating vague unease without developing deeper shared understanding of the genuine threat posed by AMR.

Social policy and austerity outcomes

Catherine here looked at calls for sociologists to ‘catch up’ with behavioural scientists and get involved in experimental trials of social policy initiatives. She points out that the use of controlled trials in social policy, however, raises a number of complex problems:

Trials often fail to end controversies. Similarly, ‘scientific’ approaches seem unlikely to remove the politics from social policy, but rather to displace and relocate some of those debates.

You can’t wear a bag on your head

This article by Catherine looked at the ongoing crisis of air pollution. Many of the solutions offered work at the level of the individual (e.g. local or domestic air filtration or monitoring). Catherine argues that these just increase existing inequalities. There is a need for a more collective response to the problems of air pollution:

Though we can contribute to the problem and solution though our actions, the fact that the effects are shared surely means there is more scope for collective action.

Nasty Bugs and Foreign Threats

The threat of infection is often treated as a form of hygienic nationalism. Catherine here investigated how the media often identifies the danger of novel infections as foreign threats:

Beyond the microbial xenophobia of these issues as risks to ‘them’ and ‘us’ – or nasty bugs located ‘there’ or ‘here’ – media narratives seem to miss something more by returning again and again to stories of ‘nasty bugs as foreign threats’. We also live alongside numerous bacteria, many of which are useful or as least harmless… The very distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ may be misleading.

Ethics at the coalface

In this blog, Catherine asked what the right way is for medical sociology researchers to conduct ethically sound research in complex social and political situations:

For those of us working in this area I think there is a choice about how far we buy into frameworks of ‘ethics’ or other ways of approaching normative questions. These often fail to do justice to the overwhelming complexity of the social, moral, legal and political contexts in which research (and life) takes place.

Statins and their side effects

Catherine here looked at the thorny issue of weighing the benefits and dangers of statin use. On balance, the positive effects of statins tend to outweigh the negative ones. The positive effects of statin use tend to outweigh the negative ones. However, patients need to be informed about potential negative aspects:

I don’t see why tools attempting to show patients the benefits of statins could not attempt to put in a fuller range of possible harms (including side effects and adverse events) and even – quite simply – acknowledge that people don’t like taking pills…

‘It’s like being told repeatedly that Father Christmas doesn’t exist’

In this article, Catherine examines the problem of medicines with no clinical benefits and asks if there is a better way to communicate the limits of medicine to the public. Campaigns to communicate the limits of medicine often appear to treat the public like children:

The campaign may trigger a moment of disenchantment for some, like a loss of faith in Father Christmas, but I suspect few are really surprised medicine cannot always deliver. The campaign fails because it does not acknowledge this or seek to use it, but talks to patients like naive children. In my recent experience, the truth about Father Christmas doesn’t usually come because an adult breaks the news, but out of a sustained campaign by kids observing, debating and even experimenting.

The Catherine Will Symposium. April 14th 2025, University of Sussex

The symposium honours the life and work of Catherine Will, Professor of Science and Technology Studies, University of Sussex. Catherine died in 2024 and left a legacy of academic work across a number of social science areas, including science and technology studies (STS), sociology of health, medicine and illness, politics and economics of health, social practices, research methods, social theory and social justice.

This one day symposium will bring together researchers and activists from a range of disciplines and topics that have connections to themes and approaches in Catherine’s work. The event will be structured around short papers (ten minute presentations) in any area related to STS; politics, economics and sociology of health, medicine and illness; sociology as practice and social theory.

Please present abstracts in the following way:
• Name
• Institutional Link (if any)
• 150 words outlining the focus of your contribution and links with Catherine and her work
• Up to 5 keywords

Please send abstracts to mie23@sussex.ac.uk by 31st January 2025

The aim is to be able to put the event on without any charges to participants, and the assumption is that most participants will be able to cover their own travel and accommodation. However, if you need help with this please give an indication of the kind of support needed and costs involved (accommodation/ travel) when submitting an abstract.