Citation

Klein D. Pediatrics 1969; 44(5): 805-810.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1969, American Academy of Pediatrics)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed an increasing recognition on the part of the physician and the behavioral scientist that the state of a person's health--indeed, even his likelihood of surviving infancy or of being institutionalized for mental illness-is closely related to his social status and to the social, political, economic, and cultural characteristics of his community, his state, and his nation. With the growth of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, such "purely biological" phenomena as infant mortality, mental illness, malnutrition, and venereal disease have come to concern the sociologist and the anthropologist as strongly as they have the physician and the epidemiologist.
Accidental injury and death, however, have to a large extent remained outside the sphere of interdisciplinary scrutiny. One reason for this neglect stems from the fact that data on accidental injury are so much less reliable than other health data as to be virtually unusable. Perhaps another reason is that the concept of an accident as an "act of God" persists in the minds of otherwise sophisticated persons--and "acts of God" seem somehow unrelated to the social and cultural environment in which they occur.
Regardless of the reasons, however, the fact remains that, although a good deal is known about the socioeconomic and cultural conditions that influence the infant mortality rate, mental illness, and cardiovascular accidents, very little is known about the relationship between social conditions and the incidence of accidental injury and death.
The following paper does nothing to advance our knowledge of this relationship. But it points out the gaps in our present knowledge, warns against pitfalls that are more familiar to behavioral than to medical scientists, and pleads for the application of sound sociological theory to a problem which is as much social as it is medical.

Language: en