How Did Social Medicine Evolve, and Where Is It Heading?

PLoS Medicine: How Did Social Medicine Evolve, and Where Is It Heading?: "The academic discipline of social medicine has struggled to find a precise definition for over a century. This struggle is exemplified by the classic social medicine course book, The Social Medicine Reader, edited by faculty from the Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which offers an expansive view of social medicine's concerns [1–4]. These concerns range from early visions of the discipline, focusing on topics such as the social and economic structure of health-care provision, health policy, and clinical holism, through to evolving concepts of the field, such as concerns with doctor/patient relations in culturally diverse societies. The evolution of social medicine as an academic subject has been internationally diverse and a coherent definition of the discipline has remained elusive. In this essay, I briefly examine some of the diverse developments of social medicine as an academic discipline and its links to political conceptualizations of the role of medicine in society. I then analyze the possible future directions open to the discipline in the Anglo-American context. A better understanding of the evolution of social medicine could help to focus its role in responding to the health needs of a post-industrial, globalizing world./.../"