Community Health Equity ― A Chicago Reader

Perhaps more than any other American city, Chicago has been a center for the study of both urban history and economic inequity. Community Health Equity assembles a century of research to show the range of effects that Chicago’s structural socioeconomic inequalities have had on patients and medical facilities alike. The work collected here makes clear that when a city is sharply divided by power, wealth, and race, the citizens who most need high-quality health care and social services have the greatest difficulty accessing them. Achieving good health is not simply a matter of making the right choices as an individual, the research demonstrates: it’s the product of large-scale political and economic forces. Understanding these forces, and what we can do to correct them, should be critical not only to doctors but to sociologists and students of the urban environment—and no city offers more inspiring examples for action to overcome social injustice in health than Chicago.

Fernando De Maio is associate professor of sociology at DePaul University and codirector of the Center for Community Health Equity. Raj C. Shah, MD, is associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center and also serves as codirector of the Center for Community Health Equity. John Mazzeo is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Master of Public Health program at DePaul University. David A. Ansell, MD, is professor of internal medicine at Rush University Medical Center, as well as the author of The Death Gap, also published by the University of Chicago Press.