Commentary: Social capital, social epidemiology and disease aetiology.

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: