This article notes an enduring ambivalence in medical sociology concerning the epistemology and ontology of disease and shows this is precisely an ambivalence concerning whether biomedical disease categories are best understood as topics of, or as resources for, medical sociological research. The first section critically reviews the topic/resource debate in ethnomethodology. The second section elaborates upon the pertinence of this debate to sociological debates directly concerned with the epistemology and ontology of disease. The article concludes by demonstrating how framing the epistemology and ontology of disease in terms of the topics and resources of medical sociological analysis serves to clarify the work of thinking sociologically about disease and helps overcome protracted theoretical challenges that have persistently troubled medical sociological research.

中文翻译：

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作为主题和资源的诊断：对医学社会学中疾病认识论和本体论的反思

本文指出了医学社会学中关于疾病的认识论和本体论的持久矛盾，并表明这恰恰是关于生物医学疾病类别是否被最好地理解为医学社会学研究的主题或资源的矛盾之处。第一部分对民族方法论中的主题/资源辩论进行了批判性的回顾。第二部分阐述了这场辩论与直接与疾病的认识论和本体论有关的社会学辩论的相关性。