The Global Social Medicine Network brings together scholars from all regions who are committed to a vision of social medicine as a vital intersection of social sciences, medical practice and policy. Our network aims to rethink social medicine’s past, to analyze its present and to re-imagine its future. We attend specifically to the revival of interest in medical humanities and the call for more social scientists of health such as sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and historians to engage with doctors, medical educators and health policy makers on critical issues of practice and policy, on the one hand, and with broader scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, on the other.
Initially funded by a Wellcome Trust grant, and launched at an international conference in London in 2018, our global network for scholarship in social medicine builds upon existing efforts to establish interdisciplinary programs in the medical humanities and offers a website to assemble an international group of scholars from social medicine centers across the world.
The network’s foundational premises are published in Global Public Health and a Lancet Perspectives Series, and the network’s outputs to date include a student-led series on the future of social medicine for Somatosphere and the recently published edited volume ‘Medicine at a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine’.
The task and opportunity of the network is to re-imagine the field of social medicine, showcase the diversity of approaches in the field and establish a truly global conversation to change the social and economic conditions that structure health inequities.