Teaching social inequalities in health: barriers and opportunities

This article examines some of the main threats and new opportunities encoun tered by teachers of social inequalities in health in contemporary academia . Focusing mostly on the recent US and European experiences, I suggest that lay world views legitimating social inequalities are often in conflict wit h explanations arising from social epidemiology and medical sociology. The dominance of medicine in public health, through its often implicit assumpti ons about the biological determinants of human behaviour, is also identifie d as a barrier to teaching social inequalities in health. Educational eliti sm, which restricts higher education to members of the upper middle class, is identified as another barrier to teaching social inequalities in health. On the other hand, teachers in this field can benefit from a recent growth of empirical studies during the last decade aimed at understanding the soc ial determinants of health inequalities. Finally, I suggest that familiarit y with current critical scholarship within public health, as well as the us e of techniques developed by sociologists to teach social stratification, c an be valuable resources for teaching social inequalities in health.