Honoring Vic Sidel

Abstract

This issue of Social Medicine honors the work of Victor W. Sidel, MD. Most of the papers come from a symposium held in his honor at the end of 2012. Their publication in this journal seems especially fitting since Dr. Sidel wrote a paper titled “Social Medicine at Montefiore: A Personal View” for the first issue of this journal in 2006. Dr. Sidel and many of the speakers at the symposium are responsible for the remarkable flowering of U.S. social medicine that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. We are delighted that many of the papers in this journal capture a bit of that remarkable period. In this editorial we would like to examine the historical context for that flowering and consider what implications it might have for social medicine today.