Social and Cultural Contributions to Health, Differences, and Inequalities

Abstract

Disease and health, birth and death, bodily suffering and debilitation are not the presumptive territory of laboratory scientists and clinicians in white coats. Scholars from the social sciences and humanities in the fields of social medicine, health humanities, sociomedical and health systems sciences, and structural competence deploy interdisciplinary tools to understand the experiences and meaning of illness, medical training and practice, and the historical, po liti cal, and structural, as well as biocultural influences on health status and disease. Here we introduce under lying concepts and perspectives foundational to social and cultural approaches to health and illness. The topics at issue are sometimes referred to as social determinants of health. We take the view that identifying and accounting for the complex synergies of the social and biological is an ongoing enterprise— promising and persuasive, but as yet an incomplete demonstration of causal, determinative certainty. The terrain includes work in medical sociology and anthropology, public health, social epidemiology, and intersectional studies of health disparity and in equality, disability, science and technology, sexualities, narrative in medicine, gender identity and expression, race and ethnicity, and disability. These approaches have in common conceptual frameworks that include the following: