The frailty of the human life and the frailty of the social and collective lives are the historical objects of medicine and the social sciences, respectively. This paper examines the connections between those two aspects of the frailty of life, through the relationships between the social sciences, medicine and public health, in their history of occasional cooperational but also of confrontation and mutual ignorance, based on historical cases - namely, French, English and American. Whereas in medicine there was an early interest on the social aspects of diseases - even though it had no lasting consequences - in the social sciences, Mauss excepted, it is only after the second world war that systematic studies about health are produced, partly linked to the establishment of systems of social protection in many countries in the aftermath of the war. In a later conjuncture, of economical retraction and strong social criticism, in last century's seventies, the sociology of health is developed in France, giving prominence to the "health market" and relegating the reflection on the frailty of life to a secondary plane. More recently, at the end of the last century, social epidemiology was rescued from the limbo, once more focusing the frailty of life as both a corporal and social issue, reaching for a closer cooperation with the social sciences. The latter have a key contribution to public health, analyzing health care systems and the access to them, the social impact of the frailty of the body or the meaning attributed by individuals experiencing it as well. It is, finally, foremost in identifying social problems linked with the health of individuals and populations, demanding in turn political action, that the contribution of the social sciences is fundamental.
Frailty of life; social sciences; public health