Skip Navigation


IJE Advance Access originally published online on October 1, 2004
International Journal of Epidemiology 2005 34(3):526-529; doi:10.1093/ije/dyh223
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
34/3/526    most recent
dyh223v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (2)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Johansson, S R.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Johansson, S R.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2004; all rights reserved.

Commentary

Commentary: The pitfalls of policy history. Writing the past to change the present

S Ryan Johansson

Cambridge Groups for the History of Population and Social Structure, Cambridge University, CB2 3EN, UK. E-mail: srjdavid@aol.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Dr Thomas McKeown was probably the most influential and most controversial health historian of his generation, at least in the English-speaking world.

His fame was the result of a radical simplification of health history that can be summarized as follows. For most of human history mortality was high and life expectancy low (between 20 and 30 years at birth) because most people were too poor, and therefore too poorly nourished, to resist the relentless onslaughts of disease, particularly infectious disease. In 18th century Western Europe, agricultural development increased the food supply and let ordinary people buy more and better food. Better nutrition increased their resistance to infectious disease, and reduced death rates, all without the assistance of medical care. It took another century (i.e. 1870) before public health and the decline of fertility made a complementary but still minor contribution to the continuing, nutrition-driven decline of mortality. Thus, if the . . . [Full Text of this Article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Int J EpidemiolHome page
N. Pearce and F. Merletti
Complexity, simplicity, and epidemiology
Int. J. Epidemiol., June 1, 2006; 35(3): 515 - 519.
[Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Int J EpidemiolHome page
G. D. Smith
Infection, medical care and inequalities
Int. J. Epidemiol., June 1, 2005; 34(3): 507 - 508.
[Full Text] [PDF]