The Social Medicine Reader

To meet the needs of the rapidly changing world of health care, future physicans and health care providers will need to be trained to become wiser scientists and humanists in order to understand the social and moral as well as technological aspects of health and illness. The Social Medicine Reader is designed to meet this need.
Based on more than a decade of teaching social medicine to first-year medical students at the pioneering Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina, The Social Medicine Reader defines the meaning of the social medicine perspective and offers an approach for teaching it. Looking at medicine from a variety of perspectives, this anthology features fiction, medical reports, scholarly essays, poetry, case studies, and personal narratives by patients and doctors—all of which contribute to an understanding of how medicine and medical practice is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces.
What happens when a person becomes a patient? How are illness and disability experienced? What causes disease? What can medicine do? What constitutes a doctor/patient relationship? What are the ethical obligations of a health care provider? These questions and many others are raised by The Social Medicine Reader, which is organized into sections that address how patients experience illness, cultural attitudes toward disease, social factors related to health problems, the socialization of physicians, the doctor/patient relationship, health care ethics and the provider’s role, medical care financing, rationing, and managed care.

The book contains black-and-white illustrations.

To meet the needs of the rapidly changing world of health care, future physicans and health care providers will need to be trained to become wiser scientists and humanists in order to understand the social and moral as well as technological aspects of health and illness. The Social Medicine Reader is designed to meet this need.
Based on more than a decade of teaching social medicine to first-year medical students at the pioneering Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina, The Social Medicine Reader defines the meaning of the social medicine perspective and offers an approach for teaching it. Looking at medicine from a variety of perspectives, this anthology features fiction, medical reports, scholarly essays, poetry, case studies, and personal narratives by patients and doctors—all of which contribute to an understanding of how medicine and medical practice is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces.
What happens when a person becomes a patient? How are illness and disability experienced? What causes disease? What can medicine do? What constitutes a doctor/patient relationship? What are the ethical obligations of a health care provider? These questions and many others are raised by The Social Medicine Reader, which is organized into sections that address how patients experience illness, cultural attitudes toward disease, social factors related to health problems, the socialization of physicians, the doctor/patient relationship, health care ethics and the provider’s role, medical care financing, rationing, and managed care.

Michele Issel

This is a compilation of enthralling, gentle, and humanistic stories that illuminate sensitive and complex sociocultural issues that pervade the delivery of healthcare. Although the editors do not explicitly state a purpose, they imply that it is to challenge standard ways of thinking. This book, although written for medical students, will be of interest to all health care professionals. Each of the five parts contains newly written chapters by highly regarded scholars including, among others, Irving Zola, Victor Fuchs, and Uwe Reinhart. These new scholarly works are complemented with relevant literary works by authors ranging from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to William Carlos Williams. At the beginning of each part, the editors offer insights and syntheses of the chapters that follow. Chapters in part one focus on culture as it relates to the experience of illness, with attention to the nature of culture, health and illness, narratives of illness, and experiences of chronic illness and disability. Part two addresses the influence of social factors on health and illness, with chapters on class, ethnicity, gender, and age. The culture of medicine is the theme for part three, with chapters on socialization of physicians, the social context of medical practice, and physician-patient relationships. Chapters in part four articulate ethical issues such as provider-patient relationships, conflicts of interest, and treatment choices. In part five, financing of health care is addressed in chapters about medical care financing, rationing healthcare, and managed care. This book is a fresh approach in the enduring quest to balance biological knowledge with social knowledge in the practice ofmedicine and healthcare delivery.

Gail E. Henderson, Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of The Chinese Hospital: A Socialist Work Unit.

Nancy M. P. King, Associate Professor of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Making Sense of Advance Directives.

Ronald P. Strauss is Professor of Dental Ecology and Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is author of numerous articles on social and ethical issues in the care of chronic illness.

Sue E. Estroff is Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Making It Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community.

Larry R. Churchill is Professor of and Chair of the Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Self-Interest and Universal Health Care: Why Well-Insured Americans Should Support Coverage for Everyone and Rationing Health Care in America: Perceptions and Principles of Justice.