José M V, Borgaro R
Salud Publica Mex. 1989 Jan-Feb;31(1):3-17.
The history of human disease has to be based almost entirely on what we know about the changes in mortality and life expectancy; illness and suffering do not lend themselves to hard statistics, whereas births and deaths can be counted. To learn about the way diseases have been conquered in the past we have, therefore, to look at mortality. From this study we see that the major lethal diseases were conquered not so much by discovering how to treat them as by prevention. The decline on mortality began at the start of the past century, at a time of revolution and reform, and was greatly accelerated when the causes of many diseases were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century, the greatest improvements are still being achieved by preventive measurements.
人类疾病史几乎完全基于我们对死亡率和预期寿命变化的了解；疾病和痛苦难以用精确的统计数据来衡量，而出生和死亡则可以计数。因此，要了解过去疾病是如何被攻克的，我们就得研究死亡率。从这项研究中我们可以看出，主要的致命疾病并非通过发现治疗方法而是通过预防才得以攻克。死亡率的下降始于上世纪初，正值革命和改革时期，而在19世纪末发现许多疾病的病因后，下降速度大大加快。即使在20世纪，最大的进步仍然是通过预防措施取得的。
