Students' Medical Council, Presidential Report.

P

A Practice of Social Medicine

SOCIAL MEDICINE may be regarded as a practice of medicine concerned with health and disease as a function of group living. It is interested in the health of people in relation to their behaviour in social groups and as such is concerned with care of the individual patient as a member of a family and of other significant groups in his daily life. It is also concerned with the health of these groups as such and with that of the whole community as a community. Concern with the health needs of larger communities and territorial groups such as cities, regions and nations is also an important area of social medicine in which the public health physician is involved. Special interest groups have been the focus of attention of yet other practitioners of social medicine. Children at school, university students and occupational groups are among the more important of these groups for whom special health services, oriented to their specific needs, have been developed. Less formal groupings are now receiving increasing attention by those concerned with community health services, such as the family, in which the relationships between the members have intimate and enduring qualities. Other significant informal groups, in which face-to-face relationships are characteristic, are friendship groups, play groups of children and the neighbourhood community, in rural village or urban neighbourhood

Patterns of health and nutrition in South African Bantu. Annexure to Section B

IT201

Growth Pattern in the First Two Years of Life in an Israeli Child Population. The Effect of Biological and Social Factors on Weight and Length.

The physical growth pattern of infants from birth to two years of age was studied in a Jerusalem mostly lower middle class community. Age and sex specific means and percentiles for weight and length at 1, 6, 12 and 24 months are presented and compared to the NCHS reference population. The study population is lighter and shorter than the US standard. In an analysis of variance the effect of sex, birth weight, duration of gestation, birth order and mothers’ educational level on weight and length at 12 and 24 months was studied. A strong association was found between birth weight and weight and length at both ages. Mothers’ educational level was associated with length only. Birth weight and sex accounted for a higher percentage of the explained variance while birth order and duration of gestation explained less than 1% of the variance. The correlation between the weight measurements and the length measurements increased with age. No statistically significant difference was found between the correlations of the purely longitudinal sample and the correlation based on all possible pairs of measurements, indicating that for some aspects of longitudinal studies a pure longitudinal sample may not be necessary