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LEADERSHIP Good Named Chair of Social Medicine After serving for a year and a half as acting chair of the Department of Social Medicine, Byron Good has been named the department chairman. Arthur Kleinman stepped down in June 2000 after holding that position since 1991. Byron Good says that the Department of Social Medicine is focusing on responses to major global health problems. Photo by Liza Green, HMS Media Services "Byron Good is a leader in applying the tools of social medicine to the world's increasingly interconnected communities, an effort necessary to reducing health disparities and improving medical practice," said Joseph Martin, dean of the Faculty of Medicine. "His experience and vision will allow the department to extend its expertise and meet challenges medicine will face in the coming years." Social medicine deals with the social and cultural aspects of illness and health care, with an emphasis on social inequalities. In the context of medical education, the discipline explores how medical practice can contribute to solving health problems with deep social roots. The primary approaches at HMS have been medical anthropology, the history of medicine, and medical ethics. "Under the direction of Arthur Kleinman and the department chair before him, Leon Eisenberg, we've built extremely strong academic programs," Good said, adding that in the next five years, the department will build on these strengths. "The Department of Social Medicine at Harvard is focusing on responses to major global health problems," he explained. "Those include problems in American communities and in low-income societies. The mission ahead of us is to develop innovative interventions for dealing with problems such as multidrug resistant TB, HIV/AIDS, and mental illnesses in resource-poor settings and generating basic science knowledge in the process. Addressing the social and ethical issues associated with new medical knowledge and new biotechnologies is also a part of our mission. "I believe Harvard Medical School should be at the forefront in developing a social medicine response to global health problems, even as it continues its leadership in the biosciences." Good joined HMS and the Department of Social Medicine and Health Policy (as it was called) in 1983 after conducting research in Iran and rural California beginning in the late 1970s. Nine years later, he was named professor of medical anthropology and vice chair of the Department of Social Medicine. Since 1996, he and his colleague and spouse Mary-Jo Good, HMS professor of social medicine, have done research in another Islamic nation, Indonesia. Based at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, his work focuses on the nature and treatment of psychotic illness and drug abuse in that country. Good is director of medical student teaching programs in the department; director of the Postdoctoral Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services; and director of the Program in International Mental Health. He is author of the book Medicine, Rationality and Experience, based in part on his study of HMS students in the New Pathway reform, is co-author of World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low-Income Countries, and since 1986, has been an editor in chief of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. --Robert Neal