Year: 2025
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Despite the influence of key figures like Henry Sigerist and the Rockefeller Foundation, social medicine achieved a formal presence at only a handful of medical schools in the US, partly reflecting the political context in which “social medicine” was often heard as “socialized medicine.” Work that might otherwise have been called social medicine had to pass under other names. Does “social medicine” in the US only include those who self-identified with social medicine or does it include people who worked in the spirit of social medicine? Beginning with the recognized work of Sigerist and the Rockefeller, we then examine several Black social theorists whose work can now be recognized as social medicine. The Cold War context challenged would-be proponents of social medicine but different threads endured. The first, clinically oriented, focused on community health. The second, based in academic departments, applied the interpretive social sciences to explore the interspace between the clinical and the social. These threads converged in the 1990s and 2000s in new forms of social medicine considered as healthcare committed to social justice and health equity.
Institutions: Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410068365