2024-01-06 11:43:46
Hippocrates believed that it was impossible to study and know all or part of the body without taking its environment into consideration. “To learn more regarding medicine, we must first consider the seasons, know the quality of the water and the winds, study the various conditions of the soil and the way of life of the inhabitants.” At the same time, on the other side of the world, Confucius taught “Ge wu”, consisting of examining the concrete nature of beings and things: “The effectiveness of the right environment is supreme, but most people have it. lost the notion a long time ago. A little later, the Taoists said that “the wise should imitate the seasons, water, earth, etc. “. The individual and the environment were considered inseparable long before Darwin.
Vague notions of hygiene, dirt, contagion and infection have crossed civilizations with more or less success depending on beliefs and fashions. The Romans, genius urban planners, managed their water and sewers. Lucretius affirmed that contagion might cause death as much as divine punishment. In the year 1000, in the Arab world, Avicenna taught hygiene in his Canon of Medicine while Europe threw its waste into the streets and into the rivers from which it drank the water. The Venetians, at the end of the 15th century, imposed quarantine on ships coming from the East.
In the 16th century, Girolamo Fracastoro spoke of “seminaria prima” capable of passing from one individual to another and multiplying to cause diseases such as the plague, syphilis, tuberculosis or typhus. The ideas of this Italian poet and doctor were forgotten before being reborn with Pasteur and Koch.
In the 18th century, the French Enlightenment developed the idea that the fate of epidemics was perhaps not inexorable. The Royal Society of Medicine is trying to shake off the lethargy of doctors by asking them to make precise records of the cartography and “meteorology” of epidemics.
In the 19th century, two thousand years following the Romans, English hygienists began to consider the “dirt” of the city once more and set up a drinking water supply and sewage system. The beginnings of a trend called social hygiene attributing illness to behaviors and infectious agents. Jenner’s vaccination and the Pasteurian apotheosis will establish the irreversibility of this concept which will define the essential role of the modern doctor.
In the 20th century, non-communicable diseases were included in the definition of preventive medicine: “Medical specialty concerning the prevention of diseases, as well as the promotion and preservation of health in the individual. »
Against these “diseases without microbes”, education takes precedence over social hygiene. And despite knowledge of the problems of nutrition, addiction and sedentary lifestyle, it is no longer scientists and politicians who call the shots.
The road may be more tortuous than for communicable diseases.
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