About this Book

"Is it a mystery that people subjected to economic deprivation, discrimination, and hazardous working and living conditions, compounded by histories of enslavement and colonization, typically have worse health, worse health care, and die younger than people with economic, social, and legal privileges? It shouldn't be. Observations about associations between societal power, position and health status, that is, the societal patterning of population health, appear in the earliest known medical writings, dating back several millennia - e.g., in texts from the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese civilizations, to name a few . Systematic documentation of such associations was also central to many of the founding reports, in the mid-19th century, of the field of public health in Europe and the Americas"--