The Department & the Field

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 on 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 unit. Although originally called the Department of Community Medicine and Hospital Administration, its broad concern with the social sciences and medical humanities led to the adoption of the name Social Medicine in 1980. While the Department’s current mission and scope far exceed these early seeds in community medicine and health care delivery systems, these focal points remain crucial to Department faculty research, scholarship, teaching and service.

Further Reading:

• D. Madison, “Introduction” to UNC Social and Administrative Medicine, 1987-1988. (UNC Chapel Hill, 1988)
  A brief review of early history of the Department.
• D. Madison, “Introduction” to Social Medicine, 1993 (UNC Chapel Hill, 1993)
  Resonances of the academic term “social medicine” in work of the Department.
• D. Madison, “Introduction: Where Medicine and Society Meet,” in Social Medicine, 1998 (UNC Chapel Hill, 1998)
  A short history of social medicine in European, US, and UNC contexts.
• M. Foucault, “Birth of Social Medicine,” in J. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3 (New York: New Press, 1984).
• G. Rosen, “What is Social Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 21 (1947): 674-733.
• D. Porter, “How Did Social Medicine Evolve, and Where Is It Heading?” PLoS Medicine 3, 10 (2006): 1667-1672.
• H. Waitzkin et al., “Social Medicine Then and Now: Lessons from Latin America,” American Journal of Public Health 91, 10 (2001): 1592-1601.
• S. Stonington et al. “Case Studies in Social Medicine—Attending to Structural Forces in Clinical Practice.”  New England Journal of Medicine 379 (2018):1958-1961.
• Perspective series (various authors).  Case Studies in Social Medicine.  New England Journal of Medicine, 2018-19.