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Concepts of Man – Concepts of Health: A Glimpse of Their Relationship in Antiquity With Relevance to Our Day and Age. Referring to ancient miraculous healing narratives, this article argues that concepts of health are inextricably intertwined with concepts of man. However, the relatively autonomous idea of medical treatments based on scientific reasoning is not an invention of modern secularization. It already existed in antiquity – even among people of faith. Gods and other religious authorities were regarded as mediating factors; they were not held responsible for diseases or cures. Examples from Christian and pagan traditions show that the interplay between ideas of man and concepts of health were extremely complex and diverse. Obviously, this was true already in antiquity – but it is even more evident in the present. Dualistic confrontations (e. g., pre-modern versus modern times, pre-scientific healing vs. academic medicine) are of little help to achieve universal health care and global health.
The Concept of Health in Immunology and Infection Biology: Nine Opportunities for the Future. Looking at our individual immune systems, one might get the impression that health is mostly a personal matter. However, infection biology immediately points to the fact that health is the outcome of a global joint effort undertaken not only by all humans, but actually by all living beings. From the very large to the very small, health is based on a fragile balance and the successful collaboration of numerous single entities in a highly sensitive and complex network that connects our innermost world with that of the outside. Diseases have been with us forever, and in the course of time, they shaped our political and cultural community. Yet, they also are one of the main drivers of evolutionary development. In that capacity, they have promoted progress from simple life forms to complex beings, i. e., ourselves. Thus, health can also be seen as the product of innumerable tiny coincidences. Politics, academia and society should ensure prevention of future detrimental (or harmful) coincidences with such tragic outcomes.
Patients’ Perspectives on Health. The following chapter presents a number of patient statements on health and disease provided by several German patient associations. In these statements, patients describe their personal experience with health and disease and how they cope with their situations. Some also emphasize what they have done to improve their wellbeing. These first-hand reports offer a glimpse of the factors that support and inhibit individual people in their everyday struggles to create and maintain their own understanding of health.
The Amazon Basin: A Forgotten Cultural Landscape and Its Medicine. While the Amazon region’s ecological importance remains uncontested, its role as a cultural hotspot is largely unknown to most people. Yet, recent archeological findings revise the image of a lush but inhospitable landscape whose farm produce could not sustain advanced civilization. The indigenous people today are only a tiny remainder of a far bigger population that developed impressive agricultural and forest engineering skills – until it was wiped out by diseases brought in from Europe. In fact, modern medicine benefits greatly from biological knowledge of indigenous Amazonians even today. This resource could prove to be much more valuable than any short-term profit realized by slash-and-burn farming or the extraction of raw materials. Therefore, it is all the more important to protect this endangered region. Scientific research will not only help to rescue indigenous biomedical knowledge, it will also give back respect and dignity to socalled savages and their cultural achievements.
The Emergence of Modern Medicine and a New Understanding of Health and Disease: Rudolf Virchow and the Berlin Medical Society. At the beginning of the 19th century, the most important cities for medicine were Paris and Vienna. Berlin had less than 200,000 inhabitants and no university.Within a short period of time, this changed dramatically – and progress in medicine was a main catalyst. At the end of the 19th century, around two million people lived in Berlin and the city had become the world metropolis of modern medicine. This article examines the main causes and the central figures of this astonishing development. The driving force behind this advance was the rise of a new sort of medicine, i. e., a medicine based on evidence and science. Here, the Berlin Medical Society and its long-time president Rudolf Virchow played a central role. His concept of cellular pathology changed the definitions, methods and understanding of health and disease. Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that Virchow served as one of the most important founding fathers of modern medicine.
The Normative Practice of Health and Disease. „Health“ and „disease“ are frequently used terms with a high relevance for our everyday lives. Their spectrum of meaning is very extensive, but also ambivalent, because they are not adequately captured by a purely medical-scientific approach. The forms of knowledge associated with „disease“ and „health“ are rather diverse and allow different ways of looking at them side by side in a justified manner. Against this background, the relationship between scientific and life world approaches to these phenomena is of central importance, because this results in very different claims to an interpretative sovereignty of „health“ and „disease“. For these states not merely have an associated dimension, but an essentially practical-normative one, so that they cannot simply be reduced to a biological function or dysfunction. This becomes especially clear when the assignment of dysfunctional conditions to the concept of disease results in immediate options for action that are not simply limited to a chapter expansion of medical textbooks, but may lead to fundamental personal and social changes. For this side of „disease“ and „health“ reflects not only medical developments, but also normative attitudes in science and society. These in turn are also decisive for the communicative structure in the doctorpatient relationship.
The World Health Organization (WHO), Pandemics, and COVID-19: How to Proceed With a Multilateral Concept of Global Health? The WHO grew to 194 member states, and with globalization, geopolitical shifts, and internal reorganizations, the lines of influence have become more complex. In 2020, the United States severely endangered multilateralism in health. Recently, the Biden administration has revived US commitment as a major global health player. Yet, the lack of coherence in supporting collective action on global health remains a problem. Global health geopolitics are shifting and China and India have acquired enough power to shape the global health agenda. At the instigation of Germany, health has become a regular topic at Group of Twenty (G20) and G7 meetings – a critical factor during the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO’s director general frequently states that health is a political choice. Many countries made unfortunate, if not questionable political choices in their responses to COVID-19. But as a matter of fact, they took the wrong turn much earlier when they neglected investments in pandemic preparedness and in the WHO. Countries have the political choice right now to seriously strengthen the WHO, its funding, and its legal power, or to weaken or even destroy one of the most important agencies in the UN system.
Local Concepts of Health and Illness in Transition: Examples from Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea societies integrate traditional medicine, biomedicine, shamanic practices, and Christian healing techniques into herbal therapies. During an episode of illness, patients pragmatically apply different diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Concepts of person and body are central to indigenous illness etiologies and therapeutic practices. This contribution offers an insight into local concepts of health in Papua New Guinea, shows interfaces of local medical systems with biomedical approaches, and addresses the constant change to which medical systems are subject.