Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- PART I WORKERS AND PLACES
- 2 Amateurs and Professionals
- 3 Discovery and Exploration
- 4 Museums
- 5 Field Stations and Surveys
- 6 Universities
- 7 Geological Industries
- 8 The Pharmaceutical Industries
- 9 Public and Environmental Health
- PART II ANALYSIS AND EXPERIMENTATION
- PART III NEW OBJECTS AND IDEAS
- PART IV SCIENCE AND CULTURE
- Index
- References
9 - Public and Environmental Health
from PART I - WORKERS AND PLACES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- PART I WORKERS AND PLACES
- 2 Amateurs and Professionals
- 3 Discovery and Exploration
- 4 Museums
- 5 Field Stations and Surveys
- 6 Universities
- 7 Geological Industries
- 8 The Pharmaceutical Industries
- 9 Public and Environmental Health
- PART II ANALYSIS AND EXPERIMENTATION
- PART III NEW OBJECTS AND IDEAS
- PART IV SCIENCE AND CULTURE
- Index
- References
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.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 141 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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