Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T20:22:26.802Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Public and Environmental Health

from PART I - WORKERS AND PLACES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2009

By
Michael Worboys
Edited by
Peter J. Bowler  and
John V. Pickstone
Peter J. Bowler
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
John V. Pickstone
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access

Summary

The principles of modern public health have been loftily defined as “the protection and promotion of the health and welfare of its citizens by the state.” Governments have taken on these responsibilities in different ways, reflecting different political cultures, disease environments, and pressures from civil society. Public health measures have concentrated on four main areas: controlling hazards in the physical environment, ensuring the quality of food and water, preventing the transmission of infectious diseases, and providing vaccinations and other individual preventive services. In each sphere, professionals have developed disciplines and technologies that have historically focused on the prevention of disease more than the promotion of health, although health education became increasingly important in the twentieth century.

Understanding and managing the physical environment has required the use and development of the physical, biological, and engineering sciences, with interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work a particular feature of public health activity. Ensuring the quality and quantity of food and water supplies also involved all the sciences. For example, a secure water supply has required knowledge of rainfall patterns from meteorology, water movements from geology and geography, extraction and storage techniques from civil engineering, processing and quality control from chemistry and biology, and physics to help deliver supplies to users. Preventing the spread of infectious diseases was a multidisciplinary enterprise involving the environmental, biological, human, and social sciences, and since the 1890s an increasing contribution from medical laboratory sciences, such as bacteriology and immunology.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 141 - 164
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

,>World Health Organisation, Tobacco or Health: A Global Status Report (Geneva: World Health Organisation, 1997).
Ackerknecht, Erwin, “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1861,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 22 (1948).Google Scholar
Adams, Mark B., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Armstrong, David, The Political Anatomy of the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);Google Scholar
Arnold, David, “The Discovery of Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 31 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, Peter, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berridge, Virginia and Strong, Paul, eds., AIDS and Contemporary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bond, George C., ed., AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean (Oxford: Westview, 1997).Google Scholar
Bynum, William F. and Fantini, Bernardino, eds., Malaria and Ecosystems: Historical Aspects (Rome: Lombardo Editore, 1994).Google Scholar
Carpenter, Kenneth, Beriberi, White Rice and Vitamin B: A Disease, a Cause and a Cure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Coleman, William, Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).Google Scholar
Cueto, Marcos, Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip D., Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Divine, Robert A., Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978);Google Scholar
Djerassi, Carl, The Politics of Contraception (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Alumni Association, 1979);Google Scholar
Duffy, John, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Eyler, John M., Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
Eyler, John, “The Conversion of Angus Smith: Chemistry to Biology,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 56 (1980).Google Scholar
Farley, John, Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Fee, Elizabeth and Porter, Dorothy, “Public Health, Preventive Medicine, and Professionalisation in Britain and the United States,” in Medicine in Society, ed. Wear, Andrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Fosdick, R. B., The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1989);Google Scholar
Fox, Daniel M., Health Policies–Health Politics: The British and American Experience, 1911–1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geison, Gerald L., The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Gorgas, Marie D. and Hendrick, Burton J., William Crawford Gorgas: His Life and Work (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1924).Google Scholar
Hamlin, Christopher, Public Health and Social Reform in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Hamlin, Christopher, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century England (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1990).Google Scholar
Hardy, Anne, The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine, 1856–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, Gordon, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of Hostilities since 1880 (London: John Murray, 1978).Google Scholar
Harrison, Mark, Public Health in India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Headrick, Daniel, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Jacobson, Harold K., Diplomats, Scientists and Politicians: The United States and the Nuclear Test (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966).Google Scholar
Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985);Google Scholar
Kraut, Alan M., Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994).Google Scholar
La Berge, Ann, Mission and Method: The Early French Public Health Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p..Google Scholar
Leavitt, Judith W., Typhoid Mary: Captive of the Public’s Health (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Manderson, Lenore, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Marco, Gino J. and Hollingworth, Robert M., eds., Silent Spring Revisited (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1987).Google Scholar
Marks, Lara, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Nutbeam, D., “Health Promotion Glossory,” Health Promotion (1986), 122.Google Scholar
Ott, Katherine, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Packard, Randall, White Plague, Black Labor (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989);Google Scholar
Packard, Randall, “Post-war Visions of Post-war Health and Development and Their Impact on Public Health Interventions in the Developing World,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the Politics and History of Knowledge, ed. Cooper, Frederick and Packard, Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Pelling, Margaret, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
Pickstone, John V., “Dearth, Dirt and Fever Epidemics: Rewriting the History of British ‘Public Health’, 1750–1850,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. Ranger, Terence and Slack, Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from the Ancients to Modern Times (London: Routledge, 1998);Google Scholar
Porter, Dorothy, ed., The History of Public Health and the Modern State (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994).Google ScholarPubMed
Porter, Dorothy, “Biologism, Environmentalism and Public Health in Edwardian England,” Victorian Studies, 34 (1991).Google ScholarPubMed
Rosen, George, A History of Public Health (New York: MD Publications, 1958).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosencrantz, Barbara, “Cart before the Horse: Theory, Practice and Professional Image in American Public Health, 1870–1920,” Journal of the History of Medicine, 29 (1974).Google Scholar
Rosner, David and Markowitz, Gerald, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Sellars, Christopher C., Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Smith, David F. and Phillips, Jim, eds., Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth Century: International and Comparative Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2000);Google Scholar
Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982).Google Scholar
Szreter, Simon, “The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain’s Mortality Decline, c. 1850–1914,” Social History of Medicine, 1 (1988);Google Scholar
Tomes, Nancy, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998);Google Scholar
Weatherall, Miles, In Search of a Cure: A History of Pharmaceutical Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Weindling, Paul, ed., International Health Organizations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whorton, James, Before “Silent Spring”: Pesticides and Public Health in Pre-DDT America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974);Google Scholar
Worboys, Michael, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Worboys, Michael, “The Comparative History of Sleeping Sickness in East and Central Africa, 1900–1914,” History of Science, 32 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×