Marital status and health: Descriptive and explanatory studies

DUring the last 30 years social factors have become increasingly important in the evolution of concepts of disease etiology. In the beginning of this century the germ theory and its monocausal orientation, attributing single diseases to single causes (i.e. infectious agents), dominated medical thinking. However, the germ theory failed to explain why only some of those persons exposed to pathogens actually contracted the disease. In addition, the germ theory was less appropriate for the explanation of degenerative causes of death such as cardiovascular diseases and malignant neoplasms, which ha... Mehr ...