In the year 1900, pneumonia and tuberculosis claimed scores of lives, more than any other cause of death.
Fast forward to 2010, those once-fatal diagnoses have been largely eradicated, allowing cancer and heart disease to become the top killers of mankind, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
The journal celebrated its 200th anniversary this year and opted to look back at their past two centuries of study to figure out how the burden of disease and the medicine meant to treat it has changed.
‘People have different diseases, doctors hold different ideas about those diseases, and diseases carry different meanings in society,’ the anniversary article reads.
The authors describe disease as ultimately a social phenomenon. Patients need to understand their symptoms, doctors need to properly diagnose them, and policy makers need to make sure that public services respond to disease and design medical systems that help combat them.
‘Disease is a deeply social process,’ the authors state. ‘Its distribution lays bare society’s structures of wealth and power, and the responses it elicits illuminate strongly held values.‘
Understanding all the inherent complexities, data show that while some killers have successfully been beaten back into near oblivion, certain ailments still claim a large percent of our population.
