ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to show how medical power has been built up. It argues that there have been several stages of medicine since the sixteenth century. In the beginning there was no effective health care. Then came a period of palliative medicine through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by the preventative care of the nineteenth century public health movement. The nineteenth century was the great era of preventative health care, spurred by the Victorian public health movement led by men like the reformers Edwin Chadwick and John Simon. By the twentieth century science was giving doctors answers and the era of curative medicine dawned. Medicine has developed further to an ameliorative stage, where the limits of the curative model are becoming clearer. The chapter focuses on the relationship between doctor and patient, the almost mysterious link between the two based on history, fear and uncertainty.
