The extensively updated and revised third edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities.



Volume 2, Differences and Inequalities, explores the fundamental sociocultural, socioeconomic, and racial dimensions that shape health differences and inequalities. These include social and cultural influences on the meanings of health, illness, and disease; social factors in the development of biomedical knowledge and systems of care; and structural explanations for why some social groups experience disproportionate burdens of disease and differences in treatment. The Reader is essential reading for all medical students, physicians, and health care providers.