Abstract

This chapter explores the history of public health. Beginning with a discussion of the health of populations in prehistory and antiquity, it examines how religious institutions of the medieval period took on the obligation to care for the poor, the needy, and the sick; how public health officials responded to plague outbreaks in the early modern period; how infectious disease devastated New World populations; how a democratic, person-centered view, which established health as a right of citizenship, arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and how various states have dealt with the health of populations since then. Then, with a focus on some contemporary issues such as climate change, it considers some of the challenges facing public health efforts in the twenty-first century.