Epidemiology in the United States after World War II: the evolution of technique.

Epidemiology as a discipline is made unique by the combination of a way of looking at things—the theory and methods of population studies—and the subject of its studies, states of health. In my view, what distinguishes the present era from the past are the concepts which guide epidemiologists. It is not so much the particulars of their discoveries about states of health as a change in theories of disease and the consequent creation of a body of methods to test those theories. These theoretic and technical ideas evolve from changes in society and from concurrent changes in the configuration of health and disease. In this paper, I focus on the theories and techniques used to cope with the changed spectrum of diseases. My primary source is precisely the literature of epidemiology on theory and method. In the period under review, theory and method have become predominant in the education of epidemiologists. It is this literature, and the growing numbers of women and men who