Professor Seth M. Holmes, affiliated with the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, leads the initiative exploring how social forces shape health and healthcare worldwide.
The medical journal The Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious scientific publications, has launched a new monthly series titled Cases in Global Social Medicine. The series explores how social determinants influence health, illness, and healthcare systems. The lead author of the introductory article is Seth M. Holmes, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona's Department of Social Anthropology, where he also heads the new Hub for Global Social Medicine.
Published within the journal's Perspectives section, the series proposes a translational approach to social medicine, an interdisciplinary field that brings together medical and social sciences. The initiative is inspired by a well-known question posed by the distinguished epidemiologist Michael Marmot: "Why treat people and then send them back to the conditions that made them sick?" In the context of rising inequalities, discrimination, and structural violence, the series aims to offer healthcare professionals new conceptual and practical tools to understand and address the social roots of illness.
Each case study focuses on a critical moment when a social force directly shapes a clinical outcome. Unlike traditional clinical case reports, these narratives are developed collaboratively by interdisciplinary teams of clinicians, social scientists, and, in some instances, members of the affected communities.
The University of Barcelona plays a central role in the initiative as a sponsoring institution and as home to the Hub for Global Social Medicine, a platform connecting researchers from the health sciences and social sciences in universities and research centers worldwide. In addition to the UB, the project is supported by institutions such as the University of Chicago, the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, Uppsala University, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Professor Holmes is an ICREA researcher at the UB and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is widely recognized for his work in social medicine and medical anthropology. He is the author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (University of California Press, 2013, 2023), a multiple award-winning ethnographic study on the intersection of migration, agricultural labour, and health in the United States. The book has been translated into multiple languages and is regarded as a seminal contribution to the field. He also led the series of social medicine case studies in The New England Journal of Medicine between 2018 and 2020. Holmes's work combines ethical commitment and scholarly rigour, advocating for structural justice and empathy as essential principles in medical practice. He has held positions at institutions such as Harvard, the University of Southern California, Humboldt University Berlin, and is an active participant in global forums on public health, migration, and human rights.
The first two articles of the series are now available: the introductory piece, "Translational social medicine for global health", is published in The Lancet , and the first case study, "Medical compartmentalisation: a patient with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome in Japan", can be accessed here .
