Advocacy and community: the social roles of physicians in the last 1000 years. Part III.

The 19th and 20th centuries were to witness dramatic developments in Western medicine. The Industrial Revolution was to transform the means by which societies generated wealth. Populations grew exponentially throughout Europe and America as epidemics receded into the pages of history, and clinical medicine -- grandchild of the Enlightenment project -- was beginning to produce long-promised therapeutic benefits for individual patients. As these factors merged, healthcare would be transformed simultaneously into a commodity -- to be bought and sold on the market -- as well as a public good, and even a right, expected by citizens from their governments. Physicians would be called upon to mediate this tension, which would come to define the context of medical practice through the end of the 20th century.