The New Science of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Vintage Books, 1996. The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, Orion Press, 1996. Darwinian medicine is the enterprise of trying to find evolutionary explanations for vulnerabilities to disease.
Every trait needs an evolutionary as well as a proximate explanation.
Disease, not being a product of selection, would seem to be excluded. This is one reason why doctors have not realized that evolution might be useful. Another reason is that medical research looks for differences between individuals in order to explain why one person gets sick while another stays healthy. But Darwinian Medicine does not seek evolutionary explanations for disease itself, and does not usually try to understand why one individual becomes ill when another does not. Instead, it tries to understand why all humans are vulnerable to each disease.