ABSTRACT
Prevention in the field of health has a very ancient history, as Cosmacini reminds us. And the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have glorified the importance and effectiveness of prevention. In health circles, the conflict between epidemiologists, who are interested in primary prevention and clinicians and scientists, who orient themselves towards secondary prevention, seems to have been won by the latter. Prevention is, by nature, egalitarian and universalistic, that is, capable in theory of providing protection to all strata of the population against the risk of falling ill, while secondary prevention is only accessible to those who can afford it in terms of financial resources, but also social and cultural ones. The biomedical knowledge of the nineteenth century and the life sciences in general, 'problematized bodily and populational life into a series of highly publicized risks and crises'.
