Social Environment and Health

In this brief volume, a distinguished medical scientist reviews a wide range of evidence linking the quality of social rellationships to physicla health and disease. At issue is the question of how social forces can affect the function and structure of bodily organs.

Over the course of recorded histoy, man's view of disease has vacillated, focusing alternately on the contributions of outside agents (evil spirits, bad air, microbes) and on defects in the sick individual himself. The author favors a different approach, also ancient in origin, which holds that disease is a consequence of the interaction between a person and his environment. Moving on from this premise, Dr. Wolf argues that the manifestation of disease are themselves evidences of biological adaptations to environmental challenges, including challenges in the psychosial sphere.

The book brings into focus the adaptive processes by which the human body wards off disease. With numerous examples the auhthor illustrates how the vital mechanisms of living creatures are maintained in a state of dynamic equilibrium capable of responding to challenges, concrete and symbolic. In this context, health reflects the quality of the adjustments and disease implies a failure of effective adaptation usually in the form of responses that are inadequate, excessive, or otherwise inappropriate.

From this analysis emerges an awareness of the importance of interdependence at every level of biological organization including social relationships. In the final chapter, the whole story of the relationship of adaptation to health is put ina philosophical framework with some predictions about the future course of human ecology.