[The integration between clinical care and population health is a priority for the health system.]

Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century the growth of scientific knowledge made it possible a wider understanding of disease mechanisms and promoted multiple government actions in several countries to improve urban hygiene, to ameliorate living conditions, and to enrich daily nutrition in order to better population health. However, during a few following decades, research progress and industrial development induced radical changes in medicine as new diagnostic tools and effective treatment capabilities became available to be administered to single patients for specific ailments. The individualized nature of these novel interventions rapidly took their control away from the public sphere into the domain of multiple bilateral relationships between patient and physician. A space was then created in which the contention between public health and clinical medicine took finally shape and the split between public health professionals - not always medical doctors - and physicians, became increasingly blatant: on one side those who cared for collective welfare on the other those who cared for individual patients. Here we still stand even if it is really difficult and poorly effective to imagine a divided health since each single patient and each health professional must constantly confront the constraints of public health policies, while public health measures are always kept at bay by individual compliance and their efficacy need to be constantly verified at an individual level. On the contrary a full integration between clinical medicine and population health is an actual priority of health planning, health policies implementation and health research as well as of practicing clinicians. Differences in issues, methods and approach cannot obviously be denied but these differences just represent the warp and weft threads of the same fabric, of a medicine which does not exist without their weaving and which grows with their development. A clinical population medicine is needed which enables professionals to operate within and outside the boundaries of their specialties to build a project of common health. A clinical population medicine in which persons and communities could found a way to socialize their health problems and to require individual as well as collective answers to their risks, their diseases and their worries. In such a way a different sense and a different meaning of its responsibility could possibly be restituted to a health system which needs to reestablish stronger ties with its constituency, a health system whose crisis depends on bureaucratization and inadequate resources as much as on its lack of sound and long-ranging perspectives.