The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine

James Le Fanu is a general practitioner and medical journalist well known during the 1990s for his exposures of the follies and pretensions of the drive to regulate lifestyle in the cause of promoting public health. In 1999 he raised the polemical stakes in this magisterial survey of modern medicine. Le Fanu boldly insists that “much current medical advice is quackery,” and recommends “the simple expedient of closing down most university departments of epidemiology,” which “could both extinguish this endlessly fertile source of anxiety-mongering while simultaneously releasing funds for …