Black LGB Health and Well-Being

Abstract

Two landmark publications during the mid-1970s, Thomas McKeown’s The Modern Rise of Population (1976) and John Cassel’s “The contribution of the social environment to host resistance” (1976), helped rekindle interest in how social factors influence health. Realization that communities and social structures affect the health of populations and affect them differentially was not new. Associations between poverty and ill health are centuries old and were key to the activist-oriented U.S. public health movement at the turn of the twentieth century. However, the ascendancy of the germ theory during the last decades of the nineteenth century dampened interest in poverty and other socially constructed conditions as significant pathways to ill health. However “wrong” the theory of miasma—that disease was caused by the fetid air produced by the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions of the urban poor—the theory at least focused public health initiatives on improving the lives of economically marginalized people. With its decline, health initiatives moved from living conditions to the laboratory.