Since the mid-nineteenth century, public health professionals have collected data about large populations to understand problems, and make changes that improve people's lives. A wealth of historical data on public health is found in the OHSU Library, particularly its Historical Collections & Archives, which contain original studies, surveys, reports, and other records of public health in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
What can this data tell us about the past and how can historical data support public health today? Digitizing these archival collections makes data accessible to new generations of researchers.
See below for links to the digital exhibit and collection of digitized materials associated with this project.
A History of Public Health by
Since publication in 1958, George Rosen's classic book has been regarded as the essential international history of public health. Describing the development of public health in classical Greece, imperial Rome, England, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, Rosen illuminates the lives and contributions of the field's great figures. He considers such community health problems as infectious disease, water supply and sewage disposal, maternal and child health, nutrition, and occupational disease and injury. And he assesses the public health landscape of health education, public health administration, epidemiological theory, communicable disease control, medical care, statistics, public policy, and medical geography. Rosen, writing in the 1950s, may have had good reason to believe that infectious diseases would soon be conquered. But as Dr. Pascal James Imperato writes in the new foreword to this edition, infectious disease remains a grave threat. Globalization, antibiotic resistance, and the emergence of new pathogens and the reemergence of old ones, have returned public health efforts to the basics: preventing and controlling chronic and communicable diseases and shoring up public health infrastructures that provide potable water, sewage disposal, sanitary environments, and safe food and drug supplies to populations around the globe. A revised introduction by Elizabeth Fee frames the book within the context of the historiography of public health past, present, and future, and an updated bibliography by Edward T. Morman includes significant books on public health history published between 1958 and 2014. For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.
Save the Babies by
Twenty-five years after its 1990 publication, Richard A. Meckel's Save the Babies remains widely acknowledged as the single most comprehensive and authoritative history of the multifaceted infant welfare campaign that attended and contributed to the dramatic late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reduction of infant mortality in the United States. Beginning with the mid-nineteenth-century transformation of infant mortality from a social fact into a social problem in need of amelioration and ending with the Great Depression, Meckel depicts and analyzes the evolution of a reform movement that had a single overriding goal but was made up of professional, political, philanthropic, and lay voluntary groups with often competing ideas and agendas. He shows how interaction and negotiation between these groups and their interests, as well as changing social and medical theory, shaped the successive ways that both the major causes of infant mortality and the best policies for its reduction were conceptualized and promoted. In an epilogue, the author provides an overview of the American discourse on infant mortality from the 1930s through the 1980s. For this new release of Save the Babies, the author has added a preface that surveys the related historical scholarship published since 1990 and details how the American discourse on infant mortality has evolved since then. Richard A. Meckel is professor of American Studies, Brown University, and author of Classrooms and Clinics: Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870-1930.
Taming Manhattan by
With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today's sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this environmental history of Gotham, a battle to control the boundaries between city and country was already being waged, and the winners would take dramatic steps to outlaw New York's wild side. Between 1815 and 1865, as city blocks encroached on farmland and undeveloped space to accommodate an exploding population, prosperous New Yorkers and their poorer neighbors developed very different ideas about what the city environment should contain. With Manhattan's image, health, and property values on their minds, the upper classes fought to eliminate urban agriculture and livestock, upgrade sanitation, build new neighborhoods, demolish shantytowns, create parks, and generally improve the sights and smells of city living. Poor New Yorkers, especially immigrants, resisted many of these changes, which threatened their way of life. By the time the Civil War erupted, bourgeois reform appeared to be succeeding. City government promised to regulate what seemed most ungovernable about urban habitation: the scourge of epidemics and fires, unending filth, and deepening poverty. Yet in privileging the priorities of well-heeled New Yorkers, Manhattan was tamed at the cost of amplifying environmental and economic disparities, as the Draft Riots of 1863 would soon demonstrate.
Medicine and Public Health in Latin America by
Despite several studies on the social, cultural, and political histories of medicine and of public health in different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, local and national focuses still predominate, and there are few panoramic studies that analyze the overarching tendencies in the development of health in the region. This comprehensive book summarizes the social history of medicine, medical education, and public health in Latin America and places it in dialogue with the international historiographical currents in medicine and health. Ultimately, this text provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medical developments while illuminating the recent challenges of global health in the region and other developing countries.
The End of a Global Pox by
By the mid-twentieth century, smallpox had vanished from North America and Europe but continued to persist throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. In 1965, the United States joined an international effort to eradicate the disease, and after fifteen years of steady progress, the effort succeeded. Bob H. Reinhardt demonstrates that the fight against smallpox drew American liberals into new and complex relationships in the global Cold War, as he narrates the history of the only cooperative international effort to successfully eliminate a human disease. Unlike other works that have chronicled the fight against smallpox by offering a "biography" of the disease or employing a triumphalist narrative of a public health victory, The End of a Global Pox examines the eradication program as a complex exercise of American power. Reinhardt draws on methods from environmental, medical, and political history to interpret the global eradication effort as an extension of U.S. technological, medical, and political power. This book demonstrates the far-reaching manifestations of American liberalism and Cold War ideology and sheds new light on the history of global public health and development.
