Origins
The Department of Social Medicine was created in 1978
as a new academic unit to incorporate the long-standing interest of the University
of North Carolina School of Medicine in community medicine and health care
delivery systems. This interest, which had been represented early by a Department
of Preventive Medicine and subsequently by divisions within Family Medicine,
Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, and by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health
Services Research, was further advanced with the establishment of the new
Department. Social Medicine soon incorporated teaching and research in the
medical humanities and social sciences within its purview. More recently it
has added to its program post-doctoral training for physicians in preventive
medicine and a major portion of the School of Medicine's efforts in health
promotion and disease prevention.
Glenn Wilson, the founding Chair, led
the Department for ten years (1978-1988). Under Wilson's leadership the Department
incorporated four existing faculty in the School of Medicine and added seven
others.
Larry
Churchill served as Chair from 1988 until 1999, when Desmond
Runyan succeeded him to become the Department's third Chair.
The Department's primary appointments now number 12, and the extended teaching faculty more than 50.
Mission
The
mission of the Department of Social Medicine is to inform the work and thought
of physicians on: (1) the social conditions and characteristics of patients,
the social causes of illness and the social barriers to effective care; and
(2) the social responsibilities of the medical professional.
The Department carries out its mission through a variety of educational, research and service activities in several venues and almost always in interdisciplinary collaboration throughout the Chapel Hill campus.
Though not an exhaustive list, the following are areas in which the Department has active teaching and research interests:
- cultural
anthropology and health;
- health
economics;
- history
of medicine and public health;
- literature
and medicine;
- medical
care organization;
- medical
ethics;
- medical
sociology;
- medicine
and the law;
- preventive
medicine and clinical epidemiology;
- public policy in health and medical care.
The faculty's varied disciplines and wide-ranging service and research associations
give evidence of how broadly the Department interprets its mission. Additionally,
members of the core faculty hold teaching appointments in several academic
units across the Chapel Hill campus.
Although diverse in its activity, the Department has emphasized
work directed to the following three areas:
- problems of the poor, elderly, chronically ill, and others with special health and medical care needs;
- questions
of allocation, distribution, organization and financing of health resources;
- health and medical care problems of North Carolina.
These areas further define Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina and may suggest to prospective students and residents the kinds of problems to which the Department gives most attention.
