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The founders of the Western medical tradition, Hippocrates and Galen, observed inequalities in health related to social circumstances over two thousand years ago. They noticed that some groups of people in ancient Greece had higher rates of sickness and died earlier than other groups. Similar observations can be made in Canada today, where, for example, people who are poor live shorter, sicker lives than those who are better off, and Aboriginal people have much higher rates of almost all diseases and a significantly shorter life span than non-Aboriginal Canadians. Whether the main causes of disease in countries are infectious (as in developing countries, or in Western industrialized countries in the past) or related to lifestyle, the poor contract those diseases more often and die of them sooner than those who are richer. When whole groups of people suffer a similar fate, we look to explanations that are beyond the individual—instead we look to social, economic, political and historical explanations.

The social determinants of health (SDOH) are social, political, economic and cultural conditions, forces and factors that influence how health is distributed among entire groups and populations. Like the field of public health, of which social determinants is a part, the study of the SDOH is an interdisciplinary field of study that draws on research and scholarship from many areas including sociology, anthropology, political science, policy studies, epidemiology, health studies and critical gender and race studies. The course will introduce basic concepts in public health and then examine fundamental determinants of health, including income and social class, ethnicity and racism and will focus on selected specific determinants (e.g. food security) and health issues (e.g. tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS).