The History of Health Related Quality of Life in 10 1/2 Paragraphs

This is the opening section ofthe last chapter ofJulian Barnes' History ofthe World in 10'2 Paragraphs. The narrator goes on to describe the other amenities of heaven which included trips to the supermarket, rounds of golf and girls on request. I quote this to illustrate that one person's heaven is another person's purgatory (in this case mine) and, hence, it may be extremely difficult to aggregate the individual views of members of a population. My purpose is to use the paradigm of 101/2 chapters to give a selective version of the development of the notion of health-related quality of life. Nomenclature in this field is at a primordial stage but one view which carries strong support is that there should be some relationship between the quality of care and quality of life. I plan to show that a number of potentially fruitful approaches to this subject have been lost in the history of ideas. To limit my field of discussion I shall confine myself to Western Europe and Euro-asia. We now know much about the development of medicine in the far East especially India and China and in the countries of South America. However, we know relatively little about how the quality of their care was monitored.