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As recently as 1945, most deaths occurred in the home. By the 1980s, just 17 percent did. Those who somehow did die at home likely died too suddenly to make it to the hospital—say, from a massive heart attack, stroke, or violent injury—or were too isolated to get somewhere that could provide help. Across not just the United States but also the enti
... See moreBy 1932, the historian Henry E. Sigerist had noted that medicine’s systemizing impulses were “no longer concerned with man but with disease,” as Anderson and Mackay point out.
Meghan O'Rourke • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
Three Stages of Health Encounters Over 8000 Human Generations and How They Inform Future Public Health
Lee Goldmanncbi.nlm.nih.gov
One reason for the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit, and this is especially true in the United States, with its heavily private and often for-profit health system. How is a doctor—or hospital or drug company—to make money from essentially healthy patients?
Barbara Ehrenreich • Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Bradner was struck by the gap between the explosion of data about the human genome and cancer on one hand and medicine’s reliance on primitive anticancer drugs like arsenic and thalidomide on the other.
Joel Gurin • Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation (Business Books)
When we ask patients which diseases their relatives had, we’re looking for genetic disorders like muscular dystrophy and hemochromatosis and more common conditions often passed from one generation to the next: diabetes, aortic aneurysms, and atherosclerosis; cancers of the breast, colon, ovary, and prostate; depression and alcohol-use disorder.
Suzanne Koven • Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life
As chronic disease came to replace communicable diseases atop the list of medicine’s priorities, realms of an individual’s life that had heretofore been considered private and therefore forbidden from physician inquiry, such as diet or marital relationships, came to be seen as important determinants of health.