Abstract
It is at this particular moment, when work is already under way by world leaders to implement the Millennium Development Goals, that we might feel uneasy about the Janus-faced nature of medicine. From its status as a marginal trade in ancient societies, modern orthodox medicine in the West has become a serious professional enterprise commanding considerable resources and research funds.2 Development in the areas of science and technology has meant that for much of the twentieth century those living in modern industrialised countries could afford to be confident about techniques used to deal efficiently with disease. Public sanitation, vaccination and the curbing of epidemics with antibiotics ensured that medicine more than lived up to its dictionary definition of being a ‘science and art concerned with the cure, alleviation, and prevention of disease … with the restoration and preservation of health’.3 We might well have anticipated living in a post-disease era, were it not for the arrival of new viruses, such as HIV/AIDS, and a resurgence of old diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.4 The latest figures for deaths caused by those diseases, as compiled in a recent report from The Lancet, showed them to be as plain as ‘1–2–3’: 1 million annual deaths from malaria, almost 2 million from tuberculosis and more than 3 million from HIV/AIDS.
We have a historic chance to build a world where all people, no matter where they’re born, can have the preventive care, vaccines, and treatments they need to live a healthy life … There is tremendous untapped potential in the scientific community to address the diseases of the developing world. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible.
Bill Gates, 16 May 20051
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Notes
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© 2006 Deborah Madden
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Madden, D. (2006). medicine, science and intellectual history. In: Whatmore, R., Young, B. (eds) palgrave advances in intellectual history. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204300_9
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