Why bother with public health history?
PUBHLTH 405
Social Epidemiology of Infectious Disease
University of Michigan School of Public Health
Jon Zelner
[email protected]
epibayes.io
Why should we care about public health history?
“History sensitizes us to the interplay of the varied social, political, and economic forces that positioned public health at different moments in time, regardless of the areas of responsibility the field claimed at the time.” (Fairchild et al. 2010)
What’s new…is old?
“For Hill, to improve the health of the nation, one had to begin changing behavior a single person at a time.”
“The field had to abandon universalist environmental solutions— introducing pure water, sewage systems, street cleaning — and begin focusing on training people how to live cleaner, more healthful lives.” (Fairchild et al. 2010)
Scientific advancement and social progress do not always sync up
“New medical technologies — antibiotics, vaccines, psychotropic medications, and a host of other clinical interventions—provided apolitical means of attacking disease without disrupting the social order.” (Fairchild et al. 2010)
The more things change…
Excerpt from Chapter 14 of Project 2025
What lessons can we draw from a historical pandemic to make sense of a more modern one?
What were the dominant patterns of race/ethnic differences in 1918 influenza infection and mortality?
How do contemporary causal explanations of these patterns differ from those offered by physicians at the time?
How have the 2020-era recommendations and predictions from the big table in this piece aged?
A historical perspective can be forward-looking 🔭
“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas…Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” (Roy 2020)
