The Department of Family and Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine has started the publication of an open-access journal entitled Social Medicine.  The first issue reprints a classic paper in social medicine: Rudolf Virchow's report on the 1848 typhus epidemic in Silesia:

"….The logical answer to the question as to how conditions similar to those that have unfolded before our eyes in Upper Silesia can be prevented in the future is, therefore, very easy and simple: education, with its daughters, liberty and prosperity. Less easy and simple, however, is the practical answer, the solution of this great social problem. For let us not conceal this from ourselves, we are now directly facing part of the great task which our century has initiated in human history and which carries within itself the development of the future. […]. Medicine has imperceptibly led us into the social field and placed us in a position of confronting directly the great problems of our time. Let it be well understood, it is no longer a question of treating one typhus patient or another by drugs or by the regulation of food, housing and clothing."

Social Medicine is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed academic forum for the development and promotion of social medicine.

The journal is written with the inventive, engaged and critical vision that animated the founders of Social Medicine.

To make this vision a reality the journal will:

1. Act as a forum for research and teaching concerning the ways in which social factors not only influence health and disease but are in turn altered by health and disease.

2. Support the WHO Alma Ata goals of Health for All and the holistic vision of health contained in the WHO charter.

3. Produce materials that are scientifically sound, intellectually honest, free of commercial bias and clearly written and presented.