Primary health care in Africa: do family physicians fit in?

Family medicine or ‘general practice’ is a very recent discipline in medicine, if you look at it in terms of academic recognition. In 1963 the University of Edinburgh appointed Richard Scott as the first professor of family medicine in the world.1 Family medicine was a concept, mainly developed in western countries, starting with postgraduate training in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, the discipline developed a specific approach to patients...