It is with great sadness that I report the death of my friend and colleague, Professor Mike Bury, at the age of 79.
Mike was an internationally acclaimed medical sociologist. He spent six formative years of his distinguished career at Bedford College, and then, following the merger with Royal Holloway, a further 19 years at RHBNC, until his (semi-) retirement in 2003. His health gradually deteriorated in the years preceding his death – a legacy of serious illness that had required radical and gruelling lung surgery, back in the 1980s. He died on 22 July 2025, in hospice care.
Mike grew up in Beckenham, Kent, where he attended Beckenham and Penge Grammar School for Boys. Having left school at 16, he re-entered the education system several years later via part-time evening A-level courses at Bromley Technical College. He then completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex, majoring in Sociology. He quickly moved on to a succession of research and teaching jobs in the Universities of Bristol (where he obtained a Master’s degree), Bath and Manchester.
In 1979, he was appointed to a lectureship in Sociology at Bedford College to work with Professor Margot Jefferys in the Social Research Unit, and to teach on the Master’s degree in Sociology as Applied to Medicine. In due course, he succeeded Professor Jefferys as Course Director of the very successful MSc in Medical Sociology. Some of Mike’s affectionate and amusing recollections of his years at Bedford College were published in a previous edition of this Newsletter (January 2021).
After the merger with Royal Holloway, Mike moved to Egham with the rest of the Department. In 1991 he was awarded a personal chair in Sociology; he served as Head of the Department of Social and Political Science from 1996 to 2001.
Mike Bury was a major figure in medical sociology, in the UK, the USA and in several European countries – including Austria and, in particular, Sweden. In 2001 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Swedish University of Linköping where, for many years, he was a visiting professor. During his academic career he authored and edited eight books and more than 60 chapters, reports and peer-reviewed articles. Following his retirement, he collaborated on policy orientated research at the London School of Pharmacy. During the 1900s and 200s he served on research committees at the Medical Research Council and on the Public Health Advisory Board at NICE. (A more substantial overview by two of Mike’s medical sociology colleagues of the impact and significance of his work can be found in this Newsletter, alongside this obituary tribute).
Mike was wonderful company and will be remembered with affection and respect by his many friends, by his former colleagues and by numerous Bedford and RHBNC alumni, particularly graduates of the MSc in Medical Sociology. He possessed a dry sense of humour, read widely and deeply and could talk, informatively and engagingly, about almost any subject under the sun. He loved the performing arts, long walks, watching cricket and, in recent years, he developed an enthusiasm for chess. He and his wife, Jenny, spent many happy years at their lovely home in Wrotham, Kent – always affectionately regarded by Mike as very much his home-county. He adored his family and is survived by Jenny, his two daughters and his two grandsons.
Professor Gavin Drewry, Emeritus Professor of Public Administration. Staff member of the Sociology Department at Bedford College, 1966-1985; then RHBNC, 1985-2009.
Professor Michael Bury’s Contribution to Medical Sociology.
As stated in Professor Drewry’s tribute to Mike Bury in this newsletter, Mike Bury is regarded as one of the most influential medical sociologists of his generation, both nationally and internationally, through his research and his teaching. As colleagues in medical sociology for almost 20 years at Bedford and then Royal Holloway, and friends for much longer, we should like to express our appreciation for the body of research that Mike has left us and for his contribution to the development of medical sociology through his teaching, particularly on the MSc in Sociology as Applied to Medicine at Bedford/Royal Holloway. This course was, for decades from its inception at Bedford College, the most significant taught postgraduate programme for would-be medical sociologists in the UK, and much of its success was due to Mike’s 24 years of teaching on it. He was Course Director from Margot Jeffreys’s retirement until 1996, and continued to teach on the course until his own retirement. We estimate that, during his career, at least two hundred MSc students, from the UK and overseas, benefited from Mike’s inspiring teaching and personal encouragement. Many of them have gone on to have distinguished careers in medical sociology and health services research, or to have used their understanding of health and illness as social phenomena in their practice as health professionals.
Mike’s research has been influential on a worldwide scale. His ground breaking article on ‘Chronic illness as biographical disruption’, published in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness in 1982, is one of the most cited articles in the journal’s history, with 6383 citations up to the end of August 2025. This article, alongside many others, made a considerable contribution to revealing more clearly the dimensions of experience that matter to chronically sick and disabled people. He also helped develop a new classification for studying and collecting routine information on disability which was subsequently published by the WHO and helped shape the UK government’s survey of disability in the 1980s.
In addition, he undertook a ground breaking national study of the health and quality of life of women and men over ninety years of age, published in 1991. This survey provided baseline information on the health and circumstances of a representative sample of the very old, all of them born before 1900. As well as being important for its empirical findings about this particular generation, this study serves as an exemplary demonstration of the importance of understanding ageing in terms of the life-courses of individual members of particular generations and of studying the implications of the intersection of biographical and historical time for the social patterning of health in extreme old age. Mike developed these ideas about generation and the life course in a number of subsequent analytical papers. Further work focused on sociological aspects of care for the dying and the controversy around medical treatments for anxiety and depression, particularly around claims about tranquillisers as a social problem by different interested parties, especially the mass media. And in more recent times he undertook a critical analysis of the expert patient programme and support for self care and began to map broader changes in health policy and health services that he referred to as ‘care transition’.
Besides his major academic contributions he was a member of the Medical Research Council’s Health Services and Public Health Board and co-editor of Sociology of Health and Illness between 1994 and 2000. He was also a member of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence’s Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee and the Health Development Council’s Public Health Advisory Board.
We are planning an extended appraisal of the impact and significance of his research for publication in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness. Publication details will be provided in a later issue of this Newsletter.
Professor Jonathan Gabe, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Dr Mary Ann Elston, Emeritus Reader in Medical Sociology, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London.
