This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say
Disease has changed since 1812. People have different diseases, doctors hold different ideas about those diseases, and diseases carry different meanings in society. […]
Disease is always generated, experienced, defined, and ameliorated within a social world. Patients need notions of disease that explicate their suffering. Doctors need theories of etiology and pathophysiology that account for the burden of disease and inform therapeutic practice. Policymakers need realistic understandings of determinants of disease and medicine’s impact in order to design systems that foster health. The history of disease offers crucial insights into the intersections of these interests and the ways they can inform medical practice and health policy. […]
The bill of mortality from 1811 contains both the familiar and the exotic. Consumption, diarrhea, and pneumonia dominated the mortality data, but teething, worms, and drinking cold water apparently killed as well. […] Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them. Reports of spontaneous combustion, especially of “brandy-drinking men and women,” received serious, if skeptical, consideration. […]
A century later, the infections had been redefined according to specific microbial causes. The Journal ran reviews of tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and syphilis. Diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and typhoid made frequent cameos, and Massachusetts still maintained a leper colony on Penikese Island.
unrelated { Miami Cannibal attacker was not on bath salts, just marijuana }
