What's so curious to me about the disaggregationist or survey-research critique of the disease concept in the 1970s is that at the time Nobody seemed to pay much atten- tion to it. Survey research had definite utilities in this clinically dominated period--esp. in providing prevalence estimates that could dramatize the need for expanded treatment services as well as providing a des- criptive epidemiology that made useful copy for, say, NIAAA's *Alcohol & Health* reports to Congress. But the *theoretical* significance of this same research seemed to pass largely unnoticed. In fact, the disease concept was *not* often directly and aggressively assaulted in the writings of contemporary sociologists (again it bears noting that this was quite unlike the situation over in the "mental illness" territory). The few critical papers that were written were published in out-of-the-way places or even not published at all. John Seeley (1962), for example, wrote a penetrating critique of the disease con- cept in Pittman & Snyder's *Society, Culture, & Drinking Patterns*--an edited volume, I would guess, that most disease advocates would be unlikely to read. Robin Room once mentioned to me that if he had read Seeley's paper beforehand he might not have gone to the trouble to write his own paper on this subject ("Assumptions and Implica- tions of Disease Concept of Alcoholism" [1970])--itself a splendid piece of analysis that did not get "published" until it was cannibalized into a chapter of Room's 1978 doctoral dissertation. Doubtless the most visibile sociological critique published in the 1970s was British sociologist David Robinson's "The Alcohologist's Addic- tion: Some Implications of Having Lost Control Over the Disease Concept of Alcoholism" (*QJSA* 33:1028-1042, 1972)--which paper drew a number of response commentaries & (I suspect) was sufficiently on-target that it contribu- ted to Edwards & Gross' motivation to begin crafting their "alcohol dependence syndrome" conceptual alternative. My point is that there is relatively little published litera- ture to support the seemingly widely held view that soci- ologists early on swaggered into Alcoholismville to shoot up the disease concept. Much early "epidemiology"--e.g., Clark's classic paper ("Operational Definitions of Drink- ing Problems and Associated Prevalence Rates," *QJSA* 27:648-668, 1966)--*could be read* as harboring serious challenges to disease conceptualization, but by and large was not perceived that way. In an appreciative review of the policy implications of Cahalan's work, published in 1975, sociologist Robert Straus (1975:128) argued: "Despite the obvious social usefulness of the disease concept, it is clear from Cahalan's findings that the medical model has outlived its usefulness as a unitary form of conceptualizing alcoholism." This was an unusually blunt assertion. It required an informed understanding of the theoretical meaning of these survey findings. Most readers with a passing interest in epidemiological findings, it seems to me, did not bring that sort of informed appreciation to the survey research results. And since sociologists themselves by and large avoided making direct challenges at the gate of the reigning paradigm--the theoretical & policy implications of their work lay, for a time, as merely latent, implicit, and uncharted prospects. Also--and significantly--the survey research challenge to disease orthodoxy made far better copy as a critique of the reigning paradigm than as a new paradigmatic/policy foundation in its own right. END OF PART III