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Harold J. Cook, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, and Anne Hardy, eds. History of the Social Determinants of Health: Global Histories, Contemporary Debates. New Perspectives in South Asian History 22. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan Private Limited, 2009. xvi + 364 pp. Ill. $16.50 (978-81-250-3508-4).
The extensive literature produced over the past five years on the area broadly defined as social determinants of health would give the impression that this is a new area of scholarship, triggered by the overwhelming evidence that the level of health of populations does not have much to do with medical care. If medical care is not so important, what is important? The answer, in this new literature, is social determinants, which include social, economic, and cultural interventions outside the realm of medicine. This new bibliography reached its height with the report of the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health, much quoted and cited worldwide-except in the United States, where, under the Bush administration, such a commission and its report were seen as threatening to the established order. The major media in the United States practically ignored the report. This was not so in Europe, where it had a considerable effect. Several countries, led by Sweden, had their governments develop national health plans that focused not so much on medical care as on interventions such as income redistribution, housing reforms, and other social interventions.
Yet, the study of social determinants of...