Læknablaðið - 01.06.1973, Blaðsíða 52

126
LÆKNABLAÐIÐ
the objectives of preventive medicine.
I have been talking throughout of meái-
cine, but I do not restrict what I say to
medical practitioners alone. Medicine ís
ncw dependent on other prefessions and
sciences to a greater extent than it has
been in the past. Nursing and medicine
have always been allied. There are now
other sciences and technologies which
contribute a great deal to total medical
care. There is or should be a greater medi-
cal profession which comprehends them
all, and within this greater medical pro-
fessicn the specialist in preventive rnedi-
cine will be judged in future as much by
the help that he gives to his colleagues
as by the direct performance of preventive
tasks himself.
It seems odd to me that I should be
liere talking to Icelanders about preventive
medicine in which your record is better
in so many respects than that oí Britain.
Your expectation of life is the longest in
the world. You match Sweden in perinatal
mortality. You have only three quarters
the cancer death rate of Britain and your
general death rate compares as well. You
have not had a case of typhoid fever in
a quarter of a century. Your abortion
rate is one fifth of ours and you are ac-
tually bringing down the incidence of
gonorrhoea. Your tuberculosis death rate
is half the British. My only justification
is that the very size of our problems may
make it easier to get evidence about some
of the possibilities of the future. Pre-
ventive medicine must now lead us toward
prevention of cancer and the degenerative
cardiovascular and respiratory conditions
at least. I believe we have accepted for
too long a base line of incidence of these
conditions as if its present height was
inevitable. We need to apply our utmost
epidemiological skills and effort to identi-
fying causal factors in malignant disease
and athercsclerosis and some of them are
already there to be seen. Preventive medi-
cine has just done the easy things; it is
time now for the real effort.