Considerable attention has been given in medical sociology to topics such as chronic illness, disability, biotechnology as well as the sociology of the body. What is striking is the absence of a clear engagement with social gerontology and the way in which social gerontologists look at health within old age. It is also true that with a few exceptions, social gerontology rarely engages with many of the insights of medical sociology. This paper seeks to describe this situation and show how changes within later life are pushing both positions into looking at the same phenomena. The paper concludes by arguing that both medical sociology and social gerontology stand to benefit from this encounter but only if they are able to adjust their assumptions about what topics fall within their remits.