As industrial society has evolved, the means of sustaining good health and effectively remedying illness have developed. Britain's nineteenth century industrial towns were the setting for a public health crisis of monstrous proportions. This began to be brought under control in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as European medicine incorporated emerging scientific techniques and technologies. The twentieth century brought further challenges in the shape of war and new scientific and technological breakthroughs, all of which have contributed to develop medical science.