Latin American social medicine: the quest for social justice and public health.

Abstract

Social justice is the foundation of public health. This controversial assertion has been the guiding principle to some, and anathema to others, ever since the rise of the modern public health movement in the mid-19th century in Europe and the Americas.1 Translated to the realms of theory and action, the premise that societal arrangements of power and property powerfully shape the public’s health has animated diverse efforts to develop cogent frameworks that explicitly identify determinants of—and can usefully guide efforts to rectify—social inequalities in health. Examples of such frameworks in the English-language literature appearing since the mid-20th century include “social medicine,” “social production of disease,” “political economy of health,” and, most recently, “health and human rights,” “population health,” and “ecosocial theory.”2 A similar discourse generated by the social, academic, and political movement collectively known as Latin American social medicine3,4 can be found in the Spanish- and Portuguese-language literature.