Fascinating! The more I study medicine and medical history the more disappointed I am with the field. Do you know of any good critiques of the McKinlays’ paper?
I think the general thesis here, that most of the mortality improvements were from sanitation/hygiene rather than from pharma or even vaccines, is fairly well-accepted. But see my comments above for how to interpret this—I don’t think there’s any reason to be disappointed with the medical field.
I don’t but I’m sure they could exist. My expertise with sources in this area is not as in depth as economics or physics history. The reason I was happy to go about publishing is because Grant Miller is known in econ world to be quite expert/careful and good at what he does. So I did have a certain faith that if in the three decades between Mckinlays writing and their papers he’d have rooted out and addressed the primary counterarguments in their two part research.
And of course I’m always open-minded to update my views as things come out now as well
Fascinating! The more I study medicine and medical history the more disappointed I am with the field. Do you know of any good critiques of the McKinlays’ paper?
I think the general thesis here, that most of the mortality improvements were from sanitation/hygiene rather than from pharma or even vaccines, is fairly well-accepted. But see my comments above for how to interpret this—I don’t think there’s any reason to be disappointed with the medical field.
I don’t but I’m sure they could exist. My expertise with sources in this area is not as in depth as economics or physics history. The reason I was happy to go about publishing is because Grant Miller is known in econ world to be quite expert/careful and good at what he does. So I did have a certain faith that if in the three decades between Mckinlays writing and their papers he’d have rooted out and addressed the primary counterarguments in their two part research.
And of course I’m always open-minded to update my views as things come out now as well