A historical introduction and theoretical concept

Abstract

As one of a series of books dealing with biomedical effects of the environment, this volume presents the thesis that more should be learned about the influence a social system has on the health of its members. Adequate experimental approaches are now available for studying the forces that can unleash the pathophysiologic influences latent in any social system, despite its current health. This holds true as much for rodent societies living in population cages as for modern man in his cities. Thus colonies of small laboratory mammals can be used in making controlled social-ethologic observations of the mechanism of disease, and data from such colonies will form a major part of this work. There have, however, been a number of similar viewpoints during the past 40 years, and reference must first be made to the observations of some men on whose work the present approach is based.