This book was selected as a 2018 "Sejong Book" in the Liberal Arts field, and was also featured at the 58th Korean Publishing Culture Awards, and in the 2017 Books of the Year by JoongAng Daily, Dong-a Ilbo, Munhwa Ilbo, Hankyoreh, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Chosun ilbo, and SISA-IN. It won 2017 Science Book of the Year by APCTP as well as the 1st Human Rights Book of the Year by Human Rights Association.

Could hate speech, discrimination in recruitment, and layoffs be the causes of our illnesses? Social epidemiologists investigate how social experiences affect our body and turn into bodily ailments. Kim Seungsup, an epidemiologist and associate professor of epidemiology at Korea University, has done research into how discriminatory events affect our health. How the social wounds caused by job insecurity, discrimination, and hatred make our bodies ill and how society is reflected in an individual's body are illustrated along with various research cases in epidemiology.
Kim claims that no illness is completely irrelevant to one's social environment, and he asks questions about the human body, health, and the social responsibilities in an individual's life. Even when advanced medical technology has made it possible to predict and cure diseases, individuals cannot become healthy without a change in society. In this book, Kim presents the data he has collected and analyzed in the form of graphs and tables. With regard to the data included in existing references, Kim also reprocessed the data. Readers can find various research cases within this book.

Kim Seungsup
graduated from the Medical School of Yonsei University and received his MA from the Seoul National University Graduate School of Public Health and PhD from the Harvard University Graduate School of Public Health. Having previously worked as a lecturer at the George Washington University Graduate School of Public Health, Kim has currently been working as an associate professor at the Korea University School of Public Health Department of Public Health Policy Management and the Department of Health Science at the graduate school of the same university since 2013. In 2016, he received the Seoktap Lecture Award, an excellence lecture award from Korea University. As a social epidemiologist, Kim has been conducting research on how social factors such as discrimination and job insecurity have a negative influence on the health of disadvantaged groups including married migrant women, temporary workers, and sexual minorities.