Sociology Pioneer Dies at 82

Eliot Freidson, adjunct professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Science who was appointed Presidential Chair in Nursing in 1994 at UCSF, died on December 14 at the Zen Hospice in San Francisco. Freidson, 82, had suffered from non-Hodgkins lymphoma for 11 months. Freidson was a major figure in the sociology of the professions. His study, Profession of Medicine (Dodd, Mead, 1970, and Chicago, 1988), is considered "a landmark study in medical sociology," according to a contemporary review by Norman Denzin in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. His last book, Professionalism, The Third Logic (University of Chicago, 2001), compared the professions in five countries. It was an attempt to establish "professionalism" as a third model for the organization of work, one that could stand alongside Adam Smith's concept of the "free market" and Max Weber's "bureaucracy." He attended the University of Maine from 1941 to 1942, and then entered the University of Chicago. After service in World War II, he obtained his bachelor's, masters' and doctor degrees at Chicago. He served on the sociology faculty at New York University from 1961 to 1973, serving as sociology department chair from 1975 - 78. He was professor emeritus of sociology at.NYU at the time he was appointed to the Presidential Chair in Nursing at UCSF in 1994. Freidson published 12 books and nearly 100 journal articles in the course of a long and distinguished career. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Guggenheim Foundation and Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Born February 20, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts, Freidson is survived by his wife Helen Giambruni, his children Jane Freidson of New York City and Matthew Freidson of Lewes, England, and four grandchildren. A third child, Oliver, died in 1976.