Health has been linked to social class dating back to the early 19th century, when the French tracked mortality in connection with areas of poverty.
Enormous progress was made in the 20th century in alleviating these conditions thanks to the development of antibiotics, vaccination, sewage management systems, hygiene, and improved education regarding sanitation and food safety, and life expectancy increased for all SES groups.
[6] Link and Phelan state that the key resources that lower SES individuals lack include knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections.
Beyond this, money also provides the ability to fund healthy choices, including purchasing nutritious food, a gym membership, and medications.
In the context of health care and access, power is the ability to exert one's influence to effect change on the behalf of oneself or others.
Power and prestige are factors in determining a person's place in the social hierarchy, and they manifest themselves in multiple ways.
Because lower-income individuals are less likely to vote for representatives and for other ballot measures, the policies and laws put into place may not serve their interests.
Since the development of the Pap smear in the 1940s, a disparity has existed in utilization of this screening test given differences in resources mentioned above.
[14] Under this theory, diffusion of information plays two roles - it can help to reduced mortality, and is a mechanism through which knowledge operates, but it is not sufficient to eliminate SES inequalities as seen in Wang et al.
[15] These examples demonstrate how intervening mechanisms, e.g., the Pap smear and the polio vaccine, did not decrease health disparities given that certain groups possessed resources to access them and others did not.