Rose’s strategy of preventive medicine

Excerpt

This new edition of Geoffrey Rose’s seminal book is very welcome. Accompanied by a commentary by Kay-Tee Khaw and Michael Marmot, it rightly leaves Rose’s original text untouched. How well does his text translate more than 15 years on? The answer is very well indeed. As Khaw and Marmot illustrate in their commentary, the basic premise that most diseases and causes are continuously distributed in the population, and that mass diseases require mass (population-wide) solutions, is as true today as it was 15 or so years ago. Like Khaw and Marmot, I was privileged to be one of Geoffrey’s students in epidemiology, and re-reading the book today (at one sitting, recommended) his wise words and clear and razor-sharp thinking jump off the page, as if attending one of his renowned lectures. Not long after completing my M.Sc. in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where Geoffrey was professor and head of department, I remarked to him that epidemiology was really quite difficult (I recall I was dealing with the vagaries of measurement error and repeated measurements, at the time, in preparation for the INTERSALT study). He looked at me clearly surprised and replied that on the contrary epidemiology was really very easy. Geoffrey excelled at making difficult concepts readily accessible, and this is one of the great strengths of this book. …