Social Medicine and Social Change

No one wants someone they love to starve or go without medicine or shelter, but one in ten people go hungry every day, a record-high number are homeless every night, and nearly three million children live in extreme poverty in the United States, one of the wealthiest nations on earth.

This course takes a social medicine approach to investigating problems of poverty and their interventions in Boston, Massachusetts.

Social medicine is a discipline that examines how political, economic, and historic forces become embodied as pathologies and how the same forces that create uneven distribution of disease also create barriers to care.

Some of the pathologies we examine are addiction, hunger, homelessness, mental illness, and homicide, all worsened by racism, sexism, and sometimes the very institutions that ought to help.

In this course, we emphasize understanding the observations, judgements, and calls to action from people who endure the miseries of poverty.

To do so, students read ethnographic research in medical anthropology and learn directly from community members during class visits.

For premedical students, this course reviews concepts found on the psychological, social, and biological foundations of behavior section of the MCAT, including how sociocultural factors and access to resources have an impact on health.