Social Epidemiology In The 17th Century

According to Krieger (2001:680), the term social epidemiology was developed in 1950. For quite a number of years throughout the history, every one including the scientists, philosophers and physicians wanted to find out the root cause of diseases within a population. There were a number of controversies that came with the concept that the initial cause of a disease in a population is caused by social factors. During the 17th century, physicians, scientist and philosophers made an attempt to understand and predict a disease of which ended up leading to fact in order to identify a disease they had to look at the disease symptoms, the patient’s outcome and outbreak patterns of `a disease (Miller, Warning, Beard & Knapp, 2012:17).
Honjo (200:194)
stated that in the beginning of the 19th century, a number of different types of investigations were conducted based on the concept that there are many social condition that affect the health of an individual within a society. Therefore different theorists from different countries came up with different explanations based on the research that they conducted. Villeme who was from France decided to focus on the differences in the death rate amongst those who are poor and those that are wealthy. His main encouragement was that, if in a particular society we improve the quality of teaching in schools as well as the working conditions, the quality of death rates in both those that are poor and those that are wealthy has a high risks to reduce.