ABSTRACT
It is easy to forget how massively health care has changed over the past few generations. The most dramatic and obvious aspects of this change have been in the development of a ‘health industry’ and the increased effectiveness of certain kinds of medical care at the physical or biological levels. We have the capability today of preventing and treating some categories of pathology that ravished mankind less than a century ago. The other side of the coin is that vast numbers of people are now subject to the degenerative diseases, and to those still ill-defined ‘diseases of civilization’, presumably the sequelae of stress, noise, and of living within enormous aggregates of people who have few human bonds among them.
