Center for the History of Family Medicine (CHFM) Essay Winner
Winning Words: The Richard D. Feldman, MD Student and Resident Essay Contest
In their essay titled, Medicalizing Marginalization: The Role of Family Physicians in Treating the Social Determinants of Health, Rowan Magnuson, a first-year medical student at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Mass., writes:
“The growing emphasis on social factors’ contributions to health coincides with the decline of social services and community programs designed to combat upstream effectors directly. This leads to increased pressure on physicians to apply skills designed for clinical care to things like poverty, racism, and food insecurity.”
The essay won first place in the 2024 Richard D. Feldman, MD, Student and Resident Essay Contest. Each year, the AAFP Foundation’s Center for the History of Family Medicine (CHFM) sponsors the contest to encourage scholarly discourse and an exploration of themes relevant to the history of family medicine in the United States.
Magnuson describes seeing a lecture slide that read, “Poverty is one of the leading diseases of childhood” and thinking, “Medical school is never going to teach me to treat or cure poverty.”
They explain that the current attention on social determinants of health (SDoH), while important and well-intentioned, also raises concerns that the expectation of addressing non-medical, societal problems falls on family physicians.
Historically, Magnuson says, “When health care extends into those arenas that it doesn’t necessarily belong … there’s an inability to treat or cure, and a pressure on physicians to move outside the realm that they were trained for.”
Instead, the role of a family medicine physician should be to identify when the social determinants of health are impacting patients and to collaborate with community partners who have the ability and expertise to treat the SDoH at their root.
As the first-place winner, Magnuson was awarded $2,000. Pratiti Roy, MD, a third-year resident at the Penn Medicine Lancaster General Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program in Lancaster, Pa., was the second-place winner and received a $1,000 prize for her essay titled, The Compendium of Hardknocks: A Window into the History of Family Medicine. Roy’s essay examines the history of doctors writing, handing down and consulting pocket guides as a powerful tool for best practices.
Magnuson says the essay contest is a great reminder for students and residents to use their critical thinking skills and “investigate everything we’re being taught,” even when it aligns with their views. To anyone interested in entering the contest, they advise, “Pick a topic that you are genuinely conflicted about — something that you want to interrogate or learn more about.”
Applications for the 2025 Richard D. Feldman, MD Student and Resident Essay Contest will be accepted from August 15 to November 1, 2025.