PHM-Exch> New Book: Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Howard Waitzkin <waitzkin at unm.edu>

 *Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation*, recently came out (
https://www.routledge.com/Social-Medicine-and-the-Coming-Transformation/Waitzkin-Perez-Anderson/p/book/9781138685987).
The book came out later than planned because we had to "hold the presses"
while we updated the parts on pandemics and racism to analyze the
transformative events of 2020. You may be interested in reading the book
and using it in teaching, research, mentoring, or activism. Below is more
information.


The  book provides a critical introduction to social medicine sheds light
on an increasingly important field, while addressing all the major problems
above and much more. For instance, the authors explain the upstream social
roots of pandemics, including COVID-19, in the social environment,
particularly the destruction of natural habitat for the sake of industrial
agriculture. Structural racism has become a key driving force in the social
determination of ill health and needlessly early death, which the authors
also consider in depth.

Drawing on examples worldwide, the authors show how principles based on
solidarity and mutual aid have helped people participate collaboratively in
creating social conditions that promote health. They offer compelling ways
to understand and to change the social dimensions of health and health
care. Anyone concerned about health will value this book, which goes beyond
the usual approaches in public health, medical sociology, health economics,
and health policy.


*Howard Waitzkin* is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the
University of New Mexico and practices internal medicine part time in New
Mexico and Illinois. For many years he has been active in struggles
focusing on social medicine in the United States and Latin America. He is
author and coordinator with the Working Group for Health beyond Capitalism
of *Health Care under the Knife: Moving beyond Capitalism for Our
Health* (2018),
and author of *Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire* (2011),
among other books.

*Alina Pérez* is a community-based physician at St. Luke’s Hospital in New
Bedford, Massachusetts. A graduate of the University of Illinois College of
Medicine at Rockford, she completed her residency at the Beth Israel
Deaconess Harvard-Affiliated Medical Center in Boston. She has conducted
research on health policy and is pursuing interests in global health and
social medicine.

*Matthew Anderson* is Associate Professor in the Department of Family and
Social Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York
City. As a family physician working in the Bronx, New York, he is a core
faculty member of the Montefiore Residency Program in Social Medicine. He
is founder and co-editor of the bilingual online journal *Social
Medicine/Medicina Social*.

*Table of Contents*

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. What Is Social Medicine?

An Outbreak of Fatal Respiratory Disease – Part One

An Outbreak of Fatal Respiratory Disease – Part Two

Another Outbreak: Typhus in Upper Silesia

Other Roots of Social Medicine

Social and Economic Conditions Impacting Health, Illness, and the Practice
of Medicine

The Health of the Population as a Matter of Social Concern

Promoting Health through Both Social and Individual Means

Why Is Critical Social Medicine Relevant Now?

2. One and a Half Centuries of Forgetting and Remembering the Social
Origins of Illness

How This Viewpoint Emerged

Friedrich Engels

Rudolf Virchow

Salvador Allende

Capitalism, Empire, Illness, and Early Death

3. The Social Determination of Illness, Part 1: Health and Social
Contradictions

Social Contradictions – Effects on Health

Plastic Workers’ Liver Cancer

Asbestos Workers’ Lung Disease and Cancer

Farmworkers’ Back

Brain Disease from Mercury Poisoning

Leukemia and Lymphoma among Electronics Workers

Upstream Causes of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Other Epidemics to Follow

Levels of Analysis in Social Medicine

4. The Social Determination of Illness, Part 2: Inequality, Class, Race,
Ethnicity, and Gender

Improving Research on Worsening Social Determinants

Social Class and Classism

Race and Racism

Gender and Sexism

Social Inequality

Social Origins, Social Reconstruction

5. Social Medicine in the United States

Can One Speak of a U.S. Social Medicine?

The First U.S. Factories, Struggles for Workers’ Health, and the Labor
Movement

Social Medicine Centered in the “Little Germany” of New York City

Health Initiatives during the Progressive Era

Experiments in Social Medicine outside New York

The Contested Status of Social Insurance in the United States

Why the Weakness of U.S. Social Insurance Compared to Other Countries?

6. Health and Empire, Part 1: Empire’s Historical Health Component

Imperialism, Medicine, and Public Health

Philanthropic Foundations

International Financial Institutions and Trade Agreements

International Health Organizations

Recycling Public Health Interventions at the End of Empire

7. Health and Empire, Part 2: Resisting Empire, Building an Alternative
Future in Medicine and Public Health

A World without Empire

The Struggle against Privatization of Health Services in El Salvador

Resistance to Privatization of Water in Bolivia

Social Medicine’s coming to Power in Mexico City

Sociomedical Activism toward a New Order

8. Social Medicine in Latin America

Productivity and Danger

Historical Roots of Latin American Social Medicine

The “Golden Age” of Social Medicine in Chile and the Role of Salvador
Allende

Social Medicine versus Public Health Elsewhere in Latin America

The 1960s and Later

Political Repression and Work Challenges

Theory, Method, and Debate

Emerging Themes

The Future of Latin American Social Medicine

9. Social Medicine and the Micro-Politics of Medical Encounters

How Society Impinges on the Medical Encounter

The Human Experience of Access Barriers

Patient-Doctor Relationships in the Era of Managed Care

Social Context and Patient-Doctor Communication

Trauma, Militarism, Mental Health and Physical Symptoms

10. Health Praxis, Reform, and Sociomedical Activism

Contradictions of Reform

Struggles for National Health Programs

Struggles to Address the Social Determination of Health and Illness

Praxis and the Health and Mental Health of Social Medicine Practitioners

Appendix: Organizations and Resources in Social Medicine
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