ABSTRACT
Robert D. Putnam sifts oceans of social and public health research data to substantiate his conclusion that living in a place that possesses or lacks social capital is as potent a predictor of longevity and function as is smoking cessation, lowering blood pressure or increasing physical activity. The American College of Physicians gave rise to the Society for Research and Education in Primary Care Internal Medicine in 1978, and that became the Society for General Internal Medicine in 1988. The final way longevity kidnapped health might well be considered an epiphenomenon –a subtle shift that happened over the years without our notice, not caused by the medical industrial complex but something that developed in parallel with it and made it possible. The shift toward possessive individualism had its seeds in the breakdown of feudalism and the emergence of an individualist merchant and bourgeois class in Europe in the late Middle Ages.
