Hi everyone, welcome to week two, or module two.
I hope you're enjoying the course and you're finding
the materials interesting.
I find the dual history of law and medicine
to be pretty fascinating.
And this might be the only time in the program
we get to think about it and talk about it, especially
when we think about what is modern medicine today.
Modern medicine is basically a new construct
from the middle to the late 20th century onward.
As you see in your readings this week,
modern medicine's fairly new over the last 100 years.
The way we think about the delivery of medicine,
the modern systems of care, the way insurance
overlays our healthcare system and how it impacts
it is all pretty new when you think about it.
The law as well, by no means, is the same as it was
1000 years ago or a couple hundred years ago.
However, the law has remained quite a bit more
similar, has not gone through major evolutions
over the last 100 years that medicine has.
The two disciplines have evolved in very similar ways
and in some very different ways.
The practice of both, both came out
of a way of mentorship and then became formalized
education, and then became very rigid practices
with oversight licenses.
So, there's a lotta similarities,
but I think the differences are also interesting.
The readings this week will contrast
the long history of law, which extends
thousands of years, with the recent developments
in modern medicine.
And none of this is to say that historically,
medicine was not effective.
Some practices were not effective,
just like law, some practices of law
were not effective.
From the time of Aristotle, roughly til
the Civil War, medical knowledge
was fairly limited.
The text will talk about the four humours
or humourism and how that idea of treating the body
remained fairly stagnant for a long time.
So, there's going to be quite a bit of nuance here,
some theories have certain changed,
practices have remained somewhat similar.
But, it's just an interesting thing to compare
to one another.
The text and the power point slides trace
the birth of modern health policy
from about Theodore Roosevelt
through the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid,
on to the Affordable Care Act.
In other courses, in my other courses,
we do talk about how medicine changed
at the start of the century.
If you're not familiar with the history of Medicare
and Medicaid, Social Security, you should
just do a little background research
'cause it really informs you how these systems developed.
We talk about the Affordable Care Act
in a lot of public health classes.
You probably have some experience with that
or you will gain some experience.
But, if you think about it, Medicare, Medicaid,
private insurances is fairly new.
Following World War II when wages were kept,
the government kept wages capped,
so you could not increase wages.
Employers had to think of really creative ways
to bring in new workers without offering more money.
And so, one of the things that they did was
offer health insurance.
That was not a new, health insurance existed,
but it was just in a very limited way.
So, following World War II, you just got
sort of this explosion of health insurance.
But, it became for basically the working population,
and the country was seeing that many people,
once they stopped working, 'cause they were older,
people with disabilities, or young children
who were too young to enter the workforce,
they didn't have this health insurance
and they were slowly losing access to health, healthcare.
And the result of that was multiple attempts
at a national health insurance system,
which didn't really work out,
and you saw Medicare and Medicaid grow,
and Social Security.
The 1960s is really the explosion.
Now, the reason I'm telling you this is
because what a profound impact it had
on healthcare to have these huge, huge,
kind of insurance systems that could implement rules.
Before that, the practice of medicine
had, had not had this other player in the game,
kinda controlling, guiding, forcing,
how the practice worked.
And so, over the last 60, 70 years
you've really seen that major impact.
Now, one of the fascinating things for me is
the legal industry has not had insurance
as a major player.
Legal insurance does exist for sure,
and it does play a part.
But it has not become this kinda colossal,
third player like it has in medicine.
So, that's one of the things that I just
wanted to point out because I think
that is a substantial difference
between the law and medicine.
So, this week is mostly a historical look.
Nothing is terribly difficult.
I find it very interesting.
So, I'll put in some additional readings
in your announcement tab.
But, feel free to explore around.
There's some videos located below
that you can watch
and certainly there's a lot of historical
information out there that you can find yourself.
So, let's dive in to the history,
similarities and differences between
law and medicine over the last couple centuries.