‘Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale,’ is a surprising quotation, because it was famously written by one of the ancestral fathers of cellular pathology. Rudolf Virchow saw that inequalities in society were responsible for much of the burden of disease at the time. In 1848, after investigating an epidemic, he argued that disease epidemics could only be eliminated through tackling social inequality. Diagnosis is the broader theme this month in the BJGP, and our Life and Times articles (as ever) highlight the idea that health and illness are biopsychosocial phenomena.

Throughout medical history, there has been a tension between systems that locate health within the patient and those that have it outside. Ben Hoban finds the determinants of health and illness by looking in (located in the biological systems of the body) and by looking out (at the way in which our health is contingent on our relationships). Domestic abuse is a …