Pathocenosis
Pathozönose (French pathocénose , English pathocenosis , Italian patocenosi ) is a technical term in medical history and epidemiology that describes the totality of all diseases in a certain society or population at a certain point in time or in a certain period and in a certain place.
Apparently based on the concept of biocenosis newly created by Karl August Möbius in 1877 , the word pathocenosis was put together by the Croatian-French medical historian Mirko Grmek from the ancient Greek words pathos ("suffering, disease") and koinos ("common") and incorporated into the history of medicine introduced.
The performance of the term consists in a more differentiated consideration of the entire pathological process that occurs in the context of a particular disease. It can be seen that this overall process strives for a state of equilibrium in which few diseases dominate. The recording of all diseases of a temporally and spatially limited population enables a more prudent assessment of those factors which disturb a given epidemiological equilibrium with regard to the dominance, frequency, duration, severity, form of the course etc. of individual diseases. A more comprehensive assessment of the biological, genetic, social, economic and demographic causes of the given disease becomes possible.
Based on this approach, it became clear, for example, that poultry diseases such as the H5N1 bird flu did not become problematic because of the migration of wild birds, but rather because of the boom in animal breeding in the 19th century.
From a historical perspective, the Corpus Hippocraticum offers such an amount of data on the prevalence of diseases that it can serve as a basis for the reconstruction of pathocenoses from antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages in Europe.
literature
- MD Grmek: Les Maladies à l'aube de la civilization occidentale. 1983.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jean-Noël Biraben, The medical thinking and the diseases in Europe , in: MD Grmek (ed.): The history of medical thinking: Antike and Medieval , Munich CH Beck 1996, 356-401, there 357 note.
- ↑ Robert Jütte : Modern augurs of bird flight. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of October 24, 2005 [1]
- ↑ Jean-Noël Biraben: The medical thinking and diseases in Europe. (as above), there 372-74: The first historically reliable description of a pathocenosis