A healthy get together

摘要

"Medicine is a social science," wrote the German patholo-gist Rudolf Virchow in 1848, "and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale." That declaration by Virchow, a social activist and champion of scientific medicine who thought that medicine needed to "enter the political and social life" to fulfil its "great task", has lost little of its relevance today. Many of the problems of medicine are indeed social, and are often best addressed politically on a national or even global scale.