Social medicine, starting two centuries ago, has shown that social conditions affect health and illness more than biology does, and social change affects the outcomes of health and illness more than health services do. Understanding and exposing sickness-generating structures in society helps us change them.
This first book providing a critical introduction to social medicine sheds light on an increasingly important field. The authors draw on examples worldwide to show how principles based on solidarity and mutual aid have enabled people to participate collaboratively to construct health-promoting social conditions. The book offers vital information and analysis to enhance our understanding regarding the promotion of health through social and individual means; the micro-politics of medical encounters; the social determination of illness; the influences of racism, class, gender, and ethnicity on health; health and empire; and health praxis, reform, and sociomedical activism. Illustrations are included throughout the book to convey these key themes and important issues, as well as on Routledge's webpage for the book, under the Support Materials tab.
The authors offer compelling ways to understand and to change the social dimensions of health and health care. Students, teachers, practitioners, activists, policy makers, and people concerned about health and health care will value this book, which goes beyond the usual approaches of texts in public health, medical sociology, health economics, and health policy.
Social medicine has the power to transform how we understand health and practice medicine. This book is an excellent introduction to the history and underlying philosophy of social medicine, but most importantly it points to the future, showing how a better understanding of social medicine can actually improve the health of populations.
Sandro Galea, Dean & Robert A. Knox Professor, Boston University School of Public Health
This is the first comprehensive textbook on social medicine that portrays its emergence and the ways in which capitalist development has produced and reproduced huge global inequalities that cause huge health disparities. The involvement of the authors in social medicine within the U.S. and in Latin America is the basis of their fertile perspective for comprehending the rise and demise of the capitalist globalization project and a hopeful basis for organizing a more humane and democratic global society.
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the?Institute for Research on World-Systems?at the University of California, Riverside
A provocative primer on social medicine - its histories, scope, arguments, and praxis. With an emphasis on critical contributions from Latin American Social Medicine, the authors ask physicians to grapple with how capitalism, imperialism, income inequality, racism, and sexism have harmed people's health and health care systems - and present revolutionary proposals for imagining and creating a more equitable, post-capitalist, and healthier future.
Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology, American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor, Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health
