Shifting Boundaries Of Public Health
Download Shifting Boundaries Of Public Health PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Shifting Boundaries Of Public Health book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Shifting Boundaries of Public Health
Author: Susan Gross Solomon
language: en
Publisher: University Rochester Press
Release Date: 2008
European public health was a playing field for deeply contradictory impulses throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s, international agencies were established with great fanfare and postwar optimism to serve as the watchtower of health the world over. Within less than a decade, local-level institutions began to emerge as seats of innovation, initiative, and expertise. But there was continual counterpressure from nation-states that jealously guarded their policymaking prerogatives in the face of the push for cross-national standardization and the emergence of original initiatives from below. In contrast to histories of twentieth-century public health that focus exclusively on the local, national, or international levels, Shifting Boundaries explores the connections or "zones of contact" between the three levels. The interpretive essays, written by distinguished historians of public health and medicine, focus on four topics: the oscillation between governmental and nongovernmental agencies as sites of responsibility for addressing public health problems; the harmonization of nation-states' agendas with those of international agencies; the development by public health experts of knowledge that is both placeless and respectful of place; and the transportability of model solutions across borders. The volume breaks new ground in its treatment of public health as a political endeavor by highlighting strategies to prevent or alleviate disease as a matter not simply of medical techniques but political values and commitments. Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Iris Borowy, James A. Gillespie, Graham Mooney, Lion Murard, Dorothy Porter, Sabine Schleiermacher, Susan Gross Solomon, Paul Weindling, and Patrick Zylberman. Susan Gross Solomon is professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman are both senior researchers at CERMES (Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé et Société), CNRS-EHESS-INSERM, Paris.
Conceptualising Public Health
In Germanic and Nordic languages, the term for ‘public health’ literally translates to ‘people’s health’, for example Volksgesundheit in German, folkhälsa in Swedish and kansanterveys in Finnish. Covering a period stretching from the late nineteenth century to the present day, this book discusses how understandings and meanings of public health have developed in their political and social context, identifying ruptures and redefinitions in its conceptualisation. It analyses the multifaceted and interactive rhetorical play through which key concepts have been used as political tools, on the one hand, and shaped the understanding and operating environment of public health, on the other. Focusing on the blurred boundaries between the social and the medico-scientific realms, from social hygiene to population policy, Conceptualising Public Health explores the sometimes contradictory and paradoxical normative aims associated with the promotion of public health. Providing examples from Northern Europe and the Nordic countries, whilst situating them in a larger European and international context, it addresses questions such as: How have public health concepts been used in government and associated administrative practices from the early twentieth century up to the present? How has health citizenship been constructed over time? How has the collective entity of ‘the people’ been associated with and reflected in public health concepts? Drawn from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, the authors collected here each examine a particular way of understanding public health and assess how key actors or phenomena have challenged, altered or confirmed past and present meanings of the concept. Conceptualising Public Health is of interest to students and scholars of health and welfare state development from diverse backgrounds, including public health, sociology of health and illness, and social policy as well as medical, conceptual and intellectual history.
The Cult and Science of Public Health
In contemporary manifestations of public health rituals and events, people are being increasingly united around what they hold in common—their material being and humanity. As a cult of humanity, public health provides a moral force in society that replaces ‘traditional’ religions in times of great diversity or heterogeneity of peoples, activities and desires. This is in contrast to public health’s foundation in science, particularly the science of epidemiology. The rigid rules of ‘scientific evidence’ used to determine the cause of illness and disease can work against the most vulnerable in society by putting sectors of the population, such as underrepresented workers, at a disadvantage. This study focuses on this tension between traditional science and the changing vision articulated within public health (and across many disciplines) that calls for a collective response to uncontrolled capitalism and unremitting globalization, and to the way in which health inequalities and their association with social inequalities provides a political rhetoric that calls for a new redistributive social programme. Drawing on decades of research, the author argues that public health is both a cult and a science of contemporary society.