Sources for Social History

The making of the English patient: a guide to sources for the social history of medicine

chosen to "exemplify the best work" (p. 1) that the Journal published in this area between 1975 and 1996. It is a selection strategy which-despite the individual worth of the articles-prompts as many questions as it answers. While the willingness of the Journal to publish such work in the first place can only be applauded, the point of producing this collection is unclear. Most substantial libr...

Social Media Sources for Personality Profiling

Social media provide a rich source of author-identified text that can be used for personality profiling. However, differences in length and number of entries, syntax, abbreviations, spelling and grammar errors, and topics can affect type and difficulty of preprocessing to extract appropriate text, accuracy of training, time period sampling for training texts, and rate of degradation of accuracy...

Revisiting the social history for child health.

Rethinking the social history.

R has established that social environments affect human health.1 Acknowledged social determinants of health — including racial or ethnic background, occupation, and the use of alcohol and tobacco2 — also influence the effectiveness of health care delivery.3 But other social factors, such as the ability to afford medications, access to transportation, available time, and competing priorities, ma...

Epidemics and Social History*

IN recent years the study of the development of English society has shown a shift of emphasis away from political and even economic problems towards those of a social and demographic nature. This shift of interest means that there is now being written more academic history which is of direct concern to the medical historian than ever before. Unfortunately medical historians themselves often see...