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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.
Evolutionary Medicine and its Holistic Concept of Health. Recent years have seen tremendous advances in our understanding of biological processes on genomic, cellular, and evolutionary levels.We owe this progress in great part to modern genetic techniques, steady improvements in imaging technology, and ground-breaking molecular tools.These findings not only helped turning Darwin’s hypothesis on the origin of species into an exact science, they also require us to integrate the complex interactions between biology, environment, and behavior into our ways of thinking. As a result, a new scientific rationale for a holistic concept of health and disease emerged: Evolutionary Medicine. The holistic approach of Evolutionary Medicine provides a new perspective on human biology: Why are people so frail, why do we get sick? Most importantly, it helps us comprehend how to better preserve health – as opposed to merely focusing on the treatment of diseases. For example, it is the misalignment between our evolutionary ‘old’ biology and our fast-changing, man-made environment (e. g., urbanization and nutrition with processed food) that helps to comprehend the emergence of civilization diseases.
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.
One Health and Human-Animal Relationships: Do We Make Our Animals Sick? Since the very beginning of human-animal relationships, humankind took advantage of animals, as of nature in general. While many people today perceive themselves as animal-loving, in reality we tend to systematically deprive our farm animals and pets of their own nature and health. On our quest to perfect our exploitation of the animal world, we reached a dimension that started to profoundly worry veterinary professionals, animal welfare activists, and also the informed public. Ultimately, this destructive relationship leads to detrimental consequences for both parties: e. g., the extinction of wild animals, or the transmission of diseases from one to the other. However, one could argue that the suffering we cause to animals clearly and by far exceeds the harm caused by, for example, the animal-derived COVID-19. Is this a too provocative hypothesis? This article is an invitation to take a closer look at various facets of our current humananimal relationship with its consequences for both.
The Feeling of Being Healthy: New Perspectives on Modern Medicine. „Well-being“ and mental health have become increasingly important in the definitions of health since 1945. Has this also changed the feeling of being healthy? The chapter demonstrates that the intuitive feeling of being healthy when the body does not cause any discomfort has been increasingly delegitimized in the last hundred years. It identifies three developments as responsible for this shift: the establishment of the risk factor model, the reconceptualization of health as result of a constant process of rebalancing health and illness, and the emphasis on the subjective component of health.
Concepts of Health in Psychiatry. In talking about concepts of health in psychiatry,we are not talking about an essentialist concept of health, where there is some essential thing that health might be. There is a straightforward sense in which psychiatric „health“ simply means the absence of psychiatric disease. Marking out our concepts of health in psychiatry would then involve marking out the boundaries between normal and abnormal psychic phenomena. However, there is no single, neat concept of health in psychiatry; nor are there concepts of health that neatly cohere into one overarching theory of health. This is not because psychiatry is vague. It is because psychiatry reflects the complexity of the whole person.