ABSTRACT
In recent years, medical researchers have shown increasing interest in the concept of quality of life. The rate of growth in the literature is illustrated by entering ‘quality of life’ as a search term in Medline (the computerised index to medical literature), which shows that there were no published papers on quality of life in the medical literature before 1966. In that year, Elkington published a paper entitled ‘Medicine and the quality of life’ (Elkington 1966). In the four years following the publication of Elkington’s paper, eight further papers were published on the topic. Since 1970, growth of interest in the field has been exponential (Table 4.1).
