Anthropology and Epidemiology in the Twentieth Century: A Selective History of Collaborative Projects and Theoretical Affinities, 1920 to 1970

Whether you primarily enjoy the progress in scientific method and knowledge made during the last hundred years, or whether you prefer to ponder those epidemiological problems, unsolved by both parties at the time and unsolved in the authors' own day, all your conclusions will be right and good.

Abstract

Whether you primarily enjoy the progress in scientific method and knowledge made during the last hundred years, or whether you prefer to ponder those epidemiological problems, unsolved by both parties [contagionists and anticontagionists] at the time and unsolved in our own day, all your conclusions will be right and good except for the one, so common in man, but so foreign to the spirit of history: that our not committing the same errors today might be due to an intellectual or moral superiority of ours. (Ackerknecht 1948: 593)