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Public Health

public health, field of medicine and hygiene dealing with the prevention of disease and the promotion of health by government agencies. In the United States, public health authorities are engaged in many activities, including inspection of persons and goods entering the country to determine that they are free of contagious disease. They are empowered to isolate persons with certain diseases and to quarantine such individuals, if necessary, for the public good. Public health officials are responsible for supervising the purity of the water, milk, and food supply as well as the persons who handle these items and the public eating places that dispense them. They are responsible for the good health of animals that supply food and for the extermination of wildlife, rodents, and insects that contribute to disease. Public health authorities are also concerned with the pollution levels in air and water, and must assure the safety of water used for drinking, for swimming, and as a source of sea food. In addition, they collect vital statistics on death rates, birth rates, communicable and chronic diseases, and other indicators of the state of public health.

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REFERENCES

  • Armstrong, David, Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
  • Evans, Richard J., Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910, Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
  • Fox, Daniel M., Power and Illness: The Failure and Future of American Health Policy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
  • Hamlin, Christopher, “Predisposing Causes and Public Health in Early Nineteenth-Century Medical Thought”, Social History of Medicine, 5 (1992): 43-70.
  • Hardy, Anne, The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine, 1856-1900, Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
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From Credo

  • Kearns, Gerry, “Introduction: Urbanisation and the Epidemiological Transition”, in Urbanisation and Epidemiologic Transition, edited by Marie C. Nelson; John Rogers, Uppsala: Reprocentralen HSC, 1989.
  • McKeown, Thomas, The Modern Rise of Population, London: Arnold, and New York: Academic Press, 1976.
  • Porter, Dorothy (ed.), The History of Public Health and the Modern State, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.
  • Riley, James C., The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease, London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin's Press, 1987.
  • Rosen, George, A History of Public Health, New York: MD Publications, 1958; revised edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
  • Slack, Paul, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
  • Webster, Charles, Problems of Health Care: The National Health Service Before 1957, London: HMSO, 1988.
  • Weindling, Paul, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.