In October 1781 an anonymous contributor to the London Courant – describing himself only as ‘No Fool’ – expressed his dissatisfaction with access to the latest periodicals at Peele's Coffee House. In his complaint, he explained that:

While the intention of ‘No Fool’s’ letter was to chastise the behaviour of other patrons in removing the newspapers from the ‘Coffee-house’ as soon as they arrived, his brief description of accessing periodicals highlights several important themes regarding the nature of reading the news in the early modern period. First, we learn that reading the news in public settings such as coffee houses was a communal activity, taking place ‘in common with others’. Second, we learn that, in order to satiate readers’ desires to learn ‘what is going forward in many parts of England’, such institutions offered patrons a variety of newspapers and, consequently, a breadth of information concerning both local and regional matters. Third, we learn that those who were reliant upon the content of newspapers privileged the timeliness of such information. Indeed, in this author's case, it was his inability to access the newspapers immediately upon the evening ‘as they arrive[d] in town’ – instead, through the actions of others, only gaining access the following morning – that triggered his complaint.

Thinking more closely about ‘No Fool’ and his fellow readers at Peele's Coffee House, this chapter focuses upon those persons who read and consumed printed news in early modern Britain and Ireland between c. 1640 and 1800. Its focus is twofold, considering both individual ‘readers’ as well as those who consumed printed material in more structured associational groups or ‘readerships’. Turning our attention first to explore readers as individuals, the first part of this chapter draws upon current scholarship concerning the history of reading to explore crucial research questions regarding the practicalities of reading printed news in early modern Britain and Ireland.

In October 1781 an anonymous contributor to the London Courant – describing himself only as ‘No Fool’ – expressed his dissatisfaction with access to the latest periodicals at Peele's Coffee House. In his complaint, he explained that:

As I have a very extensive country correspondence, and wish to know what is going forward in many parts of England, I am naturally in the habit of reporting to your Coffee-house, to embrace the opportunity it affords me, in common with others, of reading the country news-papers as they arrive in town … (‘No Fool’ 1781)

While the intention of ‘No Fool’s’ letter was to chastise the behaviour of other patrons in removing the newspapers from the ‘Coffee-house’ as soon as they arrived, his brief description of accessing periodicals highlights several important themes regarding the nature of reading the news in the early modern period. First, we learn that reading the news in public settings such as coffee houses was a communal activity, taking place ‘in common with others’. Second, we learn that, in order to satiate readers’ desires to learn ‘what is going forward in many parts of England’, such institutions offered patrons a variety of newspapers and, consequently, a breadth of information concerning both local and regional matters. Third, we learn that those who were reliant upon the content of newspapers privileged the timeliness of such information. Indeed, in this author's case, it was his inability to access the newspapers immediately upon the evening ‘as they arrive[d] in town’ – instead, through the actions of others, only gaining access the following morning – that triggered his complaint.

Thinking more closely about ‘No Fool’ and his fellow readers at Peele's Coffee House, this chapter focuses upon those persons who read and consumed printed news in early modern Britain and Ireland between c. 1640 and 1800. Its focus is twofold, considering both individual ‘readers’ as well as those who consumed printed material in more structured associational groups or ‘readerships’. Turning our attention first to explore readers as individuals, the first part of this chapter draws upon current scholarship concerning the history of reading to explore crucial research questions regarding the practicalities of reading printed news in early modern Britain and Ireland.

Acceptance that states have obligations under human rights law to take adequate steps to address the climate crisis has grown. However, discussion of how claims in this area can be adjudicated in practice has been more limited. This article outlines possible approaches that judges and other adjudicators can take, even in jurisdictions with the strongest separation of powers doctrines and where there is not yet a developed body of law in this area. Accordingly, we focus on certain minimum or ‘core’ assessment criteria that are capable of near-universal application. In this context, the terms of the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015 are key, both in setting a global temperature goal and in requiring states to ensure that their emission reductions reflect their “highest possible ambition.” We argue that this framework, together with existing due diligence principles and international scientific consensus, can provide an objective basis for assessing a state or public body’s climate policy. To illustrate this, we refer to the arguments made by Indigenous inhabitants of the Torres Strait in a pending complaint before the UN Human Rights Committee against Australia, alleging violations of the ICCPR.

American public hospitals and health centers are often criticized for their inadequate facilities or for not being patient-centred enough. Financial constraints faced by public institutions are often cited for these impediments, but government regulation also shapes the availability of good health care, with either too much or too little regulation typically impacting disproportionately upon patients whose options are limited by where they live or by the affordability of treatment. Despite the (often undervalued) endeavours of primary health care workers, many activists conclude that the system serves its own ends rather than patients’ needs – or, more polemically, that the ‘medical establishment’ poses a ‘threat to health’, as Ivan Illich famously stated in Limits to Medicine (1976). Conversely, though, health institutions are vital for preserving life and for advancing medical research, spanning a matrix of interpersonal and bureaucratic relationships which, in many ways, reflect broader changes in American society and culture. By addressing these divergent perspectives, the five authors of this section explore the politics undergirding the administration of public health institutions in terms of capacity, finances and regulation, while also reflecting historically on public–private institutional relationships, uneven efforts by authorities to tackle racial segregation in hospitals during the postwar years, and the challenges faced by the Veterans Administration in recognizing and caring for the needs of veterans facing adverse mental health experiences arising from their active service.

In assessing the role and scope of health institutions it is tempting to focus on the pace of change and technological innovations since World War II. Developments in tomography in the late 1970s and the emergence of mobile health services (or mHealth) in the 2010s, to take two examples, have offered new horizons for preserving lives. But whether we see such technological developments as complementing or straining the interpersonal bond between doctors and patients, we should remember that ‘old forms and practices coexist alongside the new’, as the 2000 volume Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations reminds us. Sometimes owners and governing bodies are resistant to change or their organizations lack the bureaucratic agility to ensure that when change happens it is in the patients’ interest.

Questions of public health hit news headlines on a global scale when in the early months of 2020 the first cases of Covid-19 were reported in Asia, North America and Europe. A wave of earlier twenty-first-century epidemics – Zika, SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 – theoretically should have equipped the global community with the surveillance strategies needed to mitigate the rapid spread of the causal virus SARS-CoV-2, which was distinctive in its high level of transmissibility and mutability, as new variants emerged during the course of 2020–22. Leading US public health officials Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, and Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), were very visible on television during 2020 in presenting public health advice and data on the pandemic, whereas in other historical phases public health officials have rarely made headline news, especially over such a sustained period. The composition of the White House coronavirus response team did not mean federal agencies were coordinating seamlessly though, or that the Trump administration was fully cognizant of the need to maintain consistent public health messages in the face of a rapidly evolving emergency, caused by what Fauci called one of the most ‘unpredictable’ of viruses.

It is important to remember that the US public health system has a complex infrastructure and a considerable reach in civic life, having expanded over the course of the twentieth century via the governance and surveillance roles of the CDC and the US Public Health Service as agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services. The fact that the responsibilities of public health agencies go well beyond infectious disease control – spanning occupational health, environmental health, bioterrorism defence and health education, among other functions – shows how public health challenges are both widespread in American society and cannot be reduced to a media spectacle at times of national emergency. While sustained congressional funding of public health services to an adequate level is an ongoing concern for the scientific and medical community, the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the functional and ethical importance of such a politically independent community to ensure that health messages are accurately communicated, and to push federal and state authorities to make decisions informed by evidence-based epidemiology and robust scientific data, ideally of an evolving, granular, and comparative nature.

On 20 July 2021, four leading United States health officials addressed a congressional hearing, ‘The Path Forward: A Federal Perspective on the Covid-19 Response’, held by the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, twenty months after the novel coronavirus was first identified as a disease event in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in central China. Rather than providing a conclusive review of the highly contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus that swept the United States and over two hundred countries through 2020, the committee recognized that the nation remained in a perilous state, with the Delta variant (first identified in India in December 2020) at that time causing more than 80 per cent of Covid-related illness and death among US citizens. The domestic and global politics of the hearing are evident from these basic facts about viral transmissibility and the framing of two Asian countries by many politicians and reporters as significant international health threats, despite the efforts of the World Health Organization to classify the sequence of Covid-19 variants alphabetically (Alpha to Omicron) so as not to stigmatize particular nations or peoples.

The co-chair, Senator Patty Murray, opened the hearing by highlighting the ‘promise and peril’ of this moment, and then the four health officials spoke in turn about the importance of the federal vaccination program for saving lives and containing viral spread, confirming that the most severe responses to Covid-19 were among unvaccinated Americans. The drama of the otherwise cordial hearing centred on a barbed exchange between Rand Paul, Republican senator from Kentucky and a trained ophthalmologist, and virologist Anthony Fauci, the long-standing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who had been a key figure in the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the final year of the Trump administration and was now President Biden's Chief Medical Advisor. Instead of addressing questions of disease prevention, Rand Paul swerved to the unproven theory that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) directly funded ‘gain of function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the 2010s, thereby making SARS-related viruses transmissible between bats and humans. Paul began by reminding Fauci that it is ‘a crime to lie to Congress’, recalling that Fauci had stated to this committee on 11 May 2021 that ‘the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research’ at the Wuhan laboratory.