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9 - Public and Environmental Health

from PART I - WORKERS AND PLACES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2009

By
Michael Worboys
Edited by
Peter J. Bowler  and
John V. Pickstone
Peter J. Bowler
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
John V. Pickstone
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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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.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 141 - 164
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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