Despite the influence of key figures like Henry Sigerist and the Rockefeller Foundation, social medicine achieved a formal presence at only a handful of medical schools in the US, partly reflecting the political context in which “social medicine” was often heard as “socialized medicine.” Work that might otherwise have been called social medicine had to pass under other names. Does “social medicine” in the US only include those who self-identified with social medicine or does it include people who worked in the spirit of social medicine? Beginning with the recognized work of Sigerist and the Rockefeller, we then examine several Black social theorists whose work can now be recognized as social medicine. The Cold War context challenged would-be proponents of social medicine but different threads endured. The first, clinically oriented, focused on community health. The second, based in academic departments, applied the interpretive social sciences to explore the interspace between the clinical and the social. These threads converged in the 1990s and 2000s in new forms of social medicine considered as healthcare committed to social justice and health equity.

Rudolf Virchow is regularly celebrated as one of the fathers of social medicine. This chapter explores the context in which Virchow wrote and published his famous statement that: “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” I discuss Virchow’s epidemiological fact-finding mission to Upper Silesia and his involvement in the revolutionary events of 1848 and 1849. I also look at the ways in which Virchow’s achievements were framed during his lifetime and in the early twentieth century, when medicine in Germany was perceived, by many, to be undergoing a crisis, caused by materialism, specialization, and a growing dominance of laboratory medicine –developments then seen as in-line with Virchow’s aims. I argue that what we think of as social medicine is an American tradition which emerged at a particular point of time in the mid twentieth century and that the image of Virchow as the father of social medicine was created then, by scholars and activists such as George Rosen and Henry Sigerist, to provide this new tradition with a longer pedigree.