Health and life

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 whooping cough. McKeown argued that the commonly held view was that the decline in illnesses, such as tuberculosis, measles, smallpox and whooping cough, was related to medical interventions such as chemotherapy and vaccinations; for example, that antibiotics were responsible for the decline in illnesses such as pneumonia and influenza. He showed, however, that the reduction in such illnesses was already under way before the development of the relevant medical interventions. McKeown therefore claimed that the decline in infectious diseases seen throughout the past three centuries is best understood not in terms of medical intervention, but in terms of social and environmental factors. He argued that:
The influences which led to [the] predominance [of infectious diseases] from the time of the first agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago were insufficient food, environmental hazards and excessive numbers and the measures which led to their decline from the time of the modern Agricultural and Industrial revolutions were predictably improved nutrition, better hygiene and contraception. (McKeown 1979: 117)