Social medicine

The field of social medicine seeks to:

This type of study began formally in the early 19th century. The Industrial Revolution and the subsequent increase in poverty and disease among workers raised concerns about the effect of social processes on the health of the poor.

Prominent figures in the history of social medicine include Rudolf Virchow, Salvador Allende, and more recently Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim.

More specifically, Farmer et al. (2006) state that "Biosocial understandings of medical phenomena [such as the social determinants of health] are urgently needed ". Paul Farmer's view is that modern medicine is focused at the molecular level, and there is a "gap" between social analysis and everyday clinical practices. Moreover, Farmer, Nizeye, Stulac and Keshavjee (2006) view social medicine with increasing importance as scientific inquiry is increasingly "desocialized". The latter refers to "...a tendency to ask only biological question about what are in fact biosocial phenomena ".

Paul Farmer

Paul Edward Farmer (born October 26, 1959) is an American anthropologist and physician who is best known for his humanitarian work providing suitable health care to rural and under-resourced areas in developing countries, beginning in Haiti. Co-founder of an international social justice and health organization, Partners In Health (PIH), he is known as "the man who would cure the world," as described in the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

Farmer is currently the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University, formerly the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an attending physician and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

In May 2009 he was named chairman of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, succeeding Jim Yong Kim, his longtime friend and collaborator. Kim was appointed as of 2012 President of the World Bank. On December 17, 2010, Harvard University's President, Drew Gilpin Faust, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, named Farmer as a University Professor, the highest honor that the University can bestow on one of its faculty members.