May 28th, 2009 The decline of infectious diseases
In his book The Role of Medicine, Thomas McKeown (1979) examined the impact of medicine on health since the seventeenth century. In particular, he evaluated the widely held assumptions about medicine’s achievements and the role of medicine in reducing the prevalence and incidence of infectious illnesses, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, measles, influenza, diphtheria, smallpox and [...]