Future world : Medicine
Everyone agrees that it is safer, easier and cheaper to prevent a disease than to try to cure it.
The first great victory in medicine came in 1798, when vaccination was worked out so that smallpox
could be prevented.
In the 1860's, the germ theory of disease was advanced and doctors began to devise ways of
preventing germs from invading the body, and of fighting them once they did.
We can handle most germ diseases now, but the great danger to human life and health are the so-
called degenerative diseases. Those involve the breakdown of the body machinery, so that a person
may come to suffer from cancer, heart trouble, arthritis, diabetes, senility, and so on.