
The historical shift from medicalization to biomedicalization is one from control over biomedical phenomena to transformations of them. Biomedicalization describes the increasingly complex, multisited, multidirectional processes of medicalization, both extended and reconstituted through the new social forms of highly technoscientific biomedicine. Since about 1985, dramatic changes in both the organization and practices of contemporary biomedicine, implemented largely through the integration of technoscientific innovations, have been coalescing into what the authors call biomedicalization, a second "transformation" of American medicine. In the next decades, medicalization-the expansion of medical jurisdiction, authority, and practices into new realms-became widespread.

The first social transformation of American medicine institutionally established medicine by the end of World War II.
