The social impact of medicine--chapter 20.

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. This paper is a compilation of other historical papers including, but not limited to, those listed in the accompanying bibliography. It is not an original paper. This paper 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.