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IJE Advance Access originally published online on July 28, 2004
International Journal of Epidemiology 2004 33(4):691-700; doi:10.1093/ije/dyh261
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IJE vol.33 no.4 © International Epidemiological Association 2004; all rights reserved.

Commentary

Commentary: Social capital, social epidemiology and disease aetiology

George Davey Smith1 and John Lynch2

1 Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Canynge Hall, Whiteladies Road, Bristol, BS8 2PR, UK. E-mail: zetkin@bristol.ac.uk
2 Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health, Department of Epidemiology, University of Michigan, 1214 South University, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548, USA

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The role of social capital in the production of health has developed over recent years into a major academic concern, and is now beginning to feed through into policy discussions concerning the determinants of population health. Social capital has, of course, had greater resonance in fields such as development economics than it has so far had in health, but the confluence of these two threads is now marked. This is made clear by the work of the leading popularizer of social capital—Robert Putnam—who in his seminal 1993 book Making Democracy Work1 explicitly states that health should not be considered an outcome of social capital, saying that:

we must be careful not to give governments credit (or blame) for matters beyond their control. In the language of policy analysis, we want to measure ‘outputs’ rather than ‘outcomes’—health care rather than mortality rates ... Health depends on factors like diet and lifestyle . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Mortality declines in 19th and early 20th century Britain: when did they occur?
 

   What were the causes of the mortality decline?
 
Respiratory tuberculosis
Haemorrhagic stroke
Bronchitis
Contribution of these causes to the mortality decline

   What changed after 1850?
 
Child labour
Real wages
Nutrition and height
Working mothers
Family size
Housing

   What caused the post-1850 changes?
 

   The downside of social capital
 

   Conclusions
 

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