Social and Geographical Pathology *

For at least a century, and perhaps much longer, autopsy pathology has been a fitting introduction to the study of clinical medicine, and in like manner one might now say that social pathology becomes a fitting introduction to the study of social medicine and the whole list of disciplines it may include. Similarly geographical pathology may become a fitting introduction to the study of world medicine or world health and their disciplines, which would be a long list indeed. If, then, these new types of pathology have such important destinies, what are they, and what do they mean? First, as to social pathology. Granted that the term implies the study of community disease, it should be early stated that it does not deserve the restricted interpretation sometimes attached to the word "social disease." Such usage would link it particularly to the study of delinquency, inebriety, vagrancy, and crime. This happily is not its meaning here. As far as I can determine, the late Dr. John A. Ryle, Director of the Institute of Social Medicine at Oxford University, believed that social pathology represented that endeavor concerned with the diagnosis of disease existent within a given population or parts of that population." He pointed out that this concept was far from new; that Sir John Symon (1816-1904) had the idea of social pathology clearly in his mind, and that the term was also employed by Alfred Grotjahn (1869-1931), the first professor of social hygiene in the University of Berlin, who made it the title of a textbook. Ryle set forth his views on social pathology in the language of the clinician he was-a clinician apparently about to perform a physical examination upon a community.t The methods of this physical examination were obviously concerned with measurements of the incidence and trends of diseases in a living community, of the frequency or absence of disease within component groups of such a community, and with correlations of this frequency with season, climate, race, and environment such as local housing, occupation, and other social conditions.