To close out my first week of medical school, the class was treated to a talk by a stuffy but soft-spoken lecturer on the relationship between poverty, education, and poor population health. “Social determinants of health,” he labeled them, a clunky and unwieldy term if ever I’d heard one. In those days, audiovisual aids consisted of an overhead projector for black-and-white transparencies. And boy did that talk have transparencies. Chart upon chart of statistic upon statistic. Between the heat and hum of the projector, and the monotone of the man in front of it, the session was little more than a sedative for most of us.
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