The social impact of medicine. Chapter 1

This paper, an overview of medical history, is based on a course I taught at the University of Delaware's Academy of Life Long Learning, "Medicine, the Old and the New." It will not be a chronology of medical events and discoveries, but a discussion of the social aspects of medicine, how medicine affected the everyday lives of people, from the religion-based medicine of antiquity to the super-scientific medicine of today. It will consist of 25 chapters. Dr. Peter V. Rocca, Editor-in-Chief of the Delaware Medical Journal (DMJ), is planning to publish one chapter in each successive issue of the DMJ.