Abstract
THIS is an abridgement of Prof. Sorsby's fuller work of the same title (Faber and Faber, 1941). More than a hundred years ago it was realized by the pioneer reformers who laid the foundations of British public health that the maintenance of health and the effective treatment of disease were much more than a question of doctor and patient. Man is a social organism and must be studied in relation to his environment. It is more advantageous to the community, for example, that a thousand cases of typhoid fever should be prevented by safeguarding the water supply, or by the detection of a carrier of the typhoid bacillus, than that cases of the declared disease should be treated successfully. The lesson has not been readily learned either by the medical profession or the public. When within the last decade medicine became more scientific and the experimental researches of the laboratory were applied at the bedside, the tendency was to regard the patient as a subject for biochemical investigation rather than an individual with an environment, which frequently enough was responsible for, or favoured, the existence of his malady.
Medicine and Mankind
By Arnold Sorsby. (Thinker's Library, No. 104.) Pp. xii + 116. (London: Watts and Co., Ltd., 1944.) 2s. 6d. net.
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M., A. Medicine and Mankind. Nature 156, 129 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/156129b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/156129b0
