> The nineteenth century brought advances in sanitation and real declines in mortality, while ideas forwarded by scientists like Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and Paul Ehrlich and the subsequent development in the twentieth century of new drugs such as antibiotics encouraged paradigm shifts in considering the human body and disease. Nevertheless, the fact that envisioning people as interchangeable patients—comprising both workforces and markets—has remained so economically and medically axiomatic, often at the expense of considerations of individual wellbeing,

This approach has actually greatly increased individual well-being. Maternal and infant mortality went down. Compound fractures no longer became a death sentence. Pneumonia no longer became a death sentence. We developed and vaccinated whole populations and even eradicated entire diseases (smallpox). We are able to relieve pain much better, Yet throughout, the article seems to view as ambiguous the superiority of modern medicine over the "many ways of understanding medicine, disease, and the human body across a vast and vibrant world rife with competing medical cultures", seemingly because it was largely European nations that developed these medicines.

This article almost reminds me of the scene in Monty Python "What have the Romans ever done for us?" Sure modern medicine gave us antibiotics and safe surgery and anesthesia and vaccines, but on the other hand, it was developed by those oppressive Europeans.