THE GREAT EXTENSION: A HISTORY OF HUMAN HEALTH

Jean-David Zeitoun

(Editions Denoël, 352 pages, 2021)

***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE***

Less than 300 years ago, by the middle of the eighteenth century, human health was in stagnation. Less than a century later, Swedish women held the world record with a mean longevity of forty-six years. In 2019, Japanese women had the best performance, estimated at eighty-eight years. Meanwhile, humans are experiencing critical difficulties in dealing with several huge risks they created themselves. Chronic conditions and all types of pollution, although not new, have reached unprecedented levels of magnitude, to the point where they have started to nullify some health benefits granted by cumulative efforts in public health and medicine. Several reports anticipate that the children born today may “enjoy” a shorter life span than their parents did, in part due to the ongoing changes in our climate. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the mortality of citizens has already increased, exhibiting a clear reversal of health progress, whose causes are mainly if not exclusively human made.

The history of health is not the history of medicine. There are many books telling the history of medicine, focusing either on specific periods or on typical diseases. Many of those books are of high interest, yet they do not provide a comprehensive explanation of improvements in populational health. Indeed, medicine is only one among the four main determinants of health, the three others being biology, behavior, and environment. In a sense, the history of health is more diverse and complex than the history of medicine. Health is not a static state and should instead be viewed as a process. Its outcome is dynamic, fragile, transient, and constantly influenced by the interaction of the above-mentioned determinants.

This book does not claim to prescribe what contemporary humans should do. But it intends to explain what history says about how we got here. Humans have recently proven their willingness to give up several advantages they painfully acquired. Through acceptance of lockdown measures, such as mandatory stay-at-home and business closures, they have demonstrated that health can now be positioned at the top of their priorities. This is a true innovation as compared to the rest of the history, where the economy has massively been the key driver of political decisions. For the first time, a majority of countries have explicitly decided to shut down the economic activity and therefore generate enormous and irrecoverable losses, with the only purpose to save the health and lives of their population.

This fascinating and comprehensive study, written so that it is accessible to all, is a must-have for anyone interested in understanding the evolution of health and humanity.

Jean-David Zeitoun is a doctor of medicine and a doctor of clinical epidemiology; in parallel to his scientific articles, he writes for leading French newspapers, such as Le Monde or Les Echos.