ABSTRACT
In Part One we saw how by the twentieth century biomedicine had come to dominate over all other healing systems. This was generally believed to be because of its greater efficacy. But hindsight suggests that this was a matter of faith rather than a proposition wholly based on good scientific evidence. It may seem strange to speak of faith in relation to a scientific enterprise, but it appears to have been just that; for the consensus, which had its roots in the nineteenth century as we have seen, seems, when looked at from a population point of view, to have been based on remarkably slender evidence.
