ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on health, its inclusion of a broad range of disciplines, and its focus on review and assessment. It examines from a multidisciplinary perspective the contributions of the social sciences to knowledge about health. The book describes the diffusion of social science into medicine and medical education. The field of anthropology is among the substantively more comprehensive of the social sciences. Demography is often thought to be a subfield of sociology, although much demographic research is in fact done by persons trained in economics, anthropology, statistics, medicine, and other fields. History, along with prehistoric archeology and historical demography, documents the past and analyzes relationships between the social environment of historical populations and their health status levels. Human geography brings into the social science arsenal the most thorough measurement and analysis of spatial characteristics of human environments, organizations, and behaviors.
