"Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale"

Calling medicine a social science recognizes that biology is braided with context. Bodies carry the imprints of housing, wages, education, food access, racism, pollution, and the stress of precarity. Clinics become mirrors of the social order: hypertension tracks segregation, asthma maps to traffic corridors, and life expectancy follows zip codes more closely than genetic codes. To heal one patient is to contend with forces that lie outside the exam room. The stethoscope, in this view, is also an instrument for listening to society, its policies, its inequities, its infrastructure of care and neglect.

If politics is medicine on a large scale, then public decisions function like therapies prescribed for populations. Budgets, zoning, labor protections, sanitation, school meals, environmental rules, and vaccination strategies are analogous to treatment plans: they prevent disease or permit it to spread, they allocate scarce resources, and they decide who is triaged and who is not. Prevention, clean water, safe housing, decent work, remains the most powerful drug. Crises such as pandemics, opioid deaths, and heat waves reveal that political choices are clinical choices by another name, determining exposure to risk and access to rescue. Evidence matters, but so do values: the dosage of justice, the side effects of exclusion, the long half-life of distrust.

The analogy carries an ethic. Neglect at the policy level amounts to malpractice, especially when the burdens fall predictably on the least powerful. Good governance, like good medicine, requires careful diagnosis, humility about uncertainty, informed consent through transparent communication, and follow-up to track outcomes. It also demands partnership with communities as co-authors of their health. Success is measured not only by averages but by the narrowing of avoidable gaps, the resilience of systems under strain, and the ability of everyday life to support flourishing. Caring for society, at scale, is the ultimate practice of care.