public health

Home > ... > Medicine > Divisions, Diagnostics, and Procedures > Medicine > ...

public health

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | 2008 | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

public health field of medicine and hygiene dealing with the prevention of disease and the promotion of health by government agencies. In the United States, public health authorities are engaged in many activities, including inspection of persons and goods entering the country to determine that they are free of contagious disease. They are empowered to isolate persons with certain diseases and to quarantine such individuals, if necessary, for the public good. Public health officials are responsible for supervising the purity of the water, milk, and food supply as well as the persons who handle these items and the public eating places that dispense them. They are responsible for the good health of animals that supply food and for the extermination of wildlife, rodents, and insects that contribute to disease. Public health authorities are also concerned with the pollution levels in air and water, and must assure the safety of water used for drinking, for swimming, and as a source of sea food. In addition, they collect vital statistics on death rates, birth rates, communicable and chronic diseases, and other indicators of the state of public health.

The duties of carrying out the many services required to keep the population healthy and to prevent serious outbreaks of disease are divided among local, state, and federal government agencies. They provide health officers and nurses for the schools and visiting nurses for the home. They oversee the water supply, the disposal of sewage, the production and distribution of milk, and the proper handling of food in restaurants. Public health agencies impose standards of public health on local communities when needed; they give financial and technical assistance to local communities in time of crisis, such as that caused by epidemics, hurricanes, and floods.

The principal federal health agency in the U.S. today is the Public Health Services division of the Department of Health and Human Services. It consists of five agencies including the National Institutes of Health , its research arm, which conducts extensive research into neurology, blindness, AIDS, immunology, and heart disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , another agency under the Public Health Service, maintains statistical data on all diseases; it was instrumental in showing the relationship between tampons and toxic shock syndrome, as well as pinpointing the source of Legionnaire's disease to a new water-borne organism. The Food and Drug Administration is the arm charged with assuring the effectiveness and purity of food, drugs, and cosmetics. The Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration was established by Congress more recently to address substance abuse and mental health problems. To carry out all these activities the public health services employ large numbers of physicians, dentists, veterinarians, laboratory technicians, nurses, sanitary engineers, health educators, psychologists, and social workers (see also Surgeon General, United States ).

Because of the frequent and rapid transportation of people and disease vectors by air there has been a growing need for the monitoring of public health on a global level. This is done by the UN's World Health Organization .

Bibliography: See studies by J. Leavitt and R. Numbers, ed. (1978), R. Bayer et al., ed. (1983), and O. Anderson (1985).

Hide all research tools
Print this article Print all entries for this topic Cite this article Link to this article
Link to this article

CloseClose

Create a link to this page

Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:

<a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/.aspx#1E1-publiche" title="Facts and information about public health">public health</a>

Add this article to Del.icio.usBookmark this article on DiigoShare this article on FacebookSubmit this article to RedditGive this article a thumbs-up on StumbleUpon
Show all research tools

Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

  • MLA
  • Chicago
  • APA

"public health." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. 8 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

"public health." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. (November 8, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-publiche.html

"public health." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Retrieved November 08, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-publiche.html

Learn more about citation styles

Public Health

The Oxford Companion to United States History | 2001 | | © The Oxford Companion to United States History 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Public Health. For much of American history, protecting local business figured prominently in public‐health efforts. During the Colonial Era, smallpox and yellow fever ravaged seaports, paralyzing business activity. Townspeople fled; shops closed; visitors avoided the stricken cities. To revitalize trade, local authorities often published false reports minimizing the danger. They also quarantined ships, established pesthouses (isolation hospitals), introduced short‐term sanitary reforms, and experimented with smallpox inoculation. A major vindication of inoculation came during a 1721 Boston epidemic that claimed nine‐hundred lives. Cotton Mather championed the procedure, while Boston's most prominent physicians opposed it. Smallpox vaccination, developed by the English physician Edward Jenner, became available by 1800.

During the nineteenth century, outbreaks of cholera, especially in 1832–1833, 1849–1850, and 1866, and other epidemic diseases shaped public‐health practice. As yellow fever devastated southern cities, physicians disagreed about whether it was contagious and how to combat it. Those who supported the broad exercise of government authority sought to quarantine incoming ships, whereas those favoring free trade and individual liberty urged the removal of decaying organic wastes, whose noxious “miasmas,” they believed, caused most epidemics. (In 1900 an army medical team led by Dr. Walter Reed at last discovered yellow fever's mode of transmission: the Aëdes egypti mosquito.)

By midcentury, local governments increasingly addressed public‐health issues. New York City built a municipal water system in 1842. Dr. John H. Griscom's The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Class of New York with Suggestions for Its Improvement (1845) proved highly influential. New York created a permanent Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866, in response to a threatened cholera epidemic, and reformers in other cities soon followed suit. As municipal water and sewer systems replaced backyard wells, cesspools, and privies, outbreaks of cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, malaria, and typhus diminished. As in the past, local business groups often led these sanitary reforms.

At the federal level, Congress in 1798 had created the U.S. Marine Hospital Service, under a Surgeon General, to care for ailing seamen. The U.S. Sanitary Commission, a volunteer agency headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, worked to improve health and sanitary conditions in Civil War military camps. Meanwhile, the Marine Hospital Service steadily expanded its activities, including a bacteriological research laboratory founded in the 1890s. Renamed the U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service in 1902, it eventually became simply the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS). Early PHS campaigns combated hookworm and pellagra.

With the triumph of the germ theory of disease and the advent of bacteriology in the early twentieth century, the rationale for public‐health efforts shifted from ridding the environment of “miasmas” to attacking disease‐causing microbes. Public health became professionalized as lay reformers gave way to physicians and scientists. The laboratory became the principal battleground against disease, with impressive results. Vaccines, serums, and tests attacked rabies, diphtheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and later, yellow fever, poliomyelitis, measles, and whooping cough. The Progressive Era's reform ethos opened new public‐health vistas, including school‐vaccination programs, maternal and child care, rural health efforts, medical inspection of immigrants, regulation of nuisance industries, inspection of food processors and providers, and campaigns to reduce infant mortality and tuberculosis. In many of these programs, the federal government played a central role. By World War I, there existed a vast network of governmental public‐health agencies, supported by the American Red Cross, settlement houses, and other volunteer groups. Although organized medicine, led by the American Medical Association, enthusiastically supported the public‐health movement, it strenuously sought to limit activities to prevention, not treatment.

As the acute, communicable diseases were defeated, attention shifted to the chronic and degenerative afflictions, especially cancer, diabetes, stroke, and heart disease. Public‐health workers alerted the public to risk factors they could control, such as obesity; poor nutrition; lack of exercise; and, in the case of venereal disease, unprotected sex. In the 1930s, Surgeon General Thomas Parran lifted the veil of silence surrounding syphilis. Beginning in the New Deal Era, the federal government increasingly funded municipal and state public‐health programs.

By the late twentieth century, public‐health efforts at all governmental levels had vastly expanded in size and complexity. In the 1990s the PHS, now a part of the Department of Health and Human Services, included the Surgeon General's Office, with a corps of over six thousand public‐health professionals; specialized agencies such as the Indian Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, the data‐gathering Centers for Disease Control, and the research‐oriented National Institutes of Health; and offices addressing such issues as aging, mental illness, minority health, women's health, physical fitness, and the AIDS epidemic. The landmark Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health (1964) alerted citizens to the hazards of smoking and led to health warnings on cigarette packages, advertising restrictions, congressional investigations, and major legal challenges to the tobacco industry. Other federal bodies addressing public‐health issues included the Bureau of Prisons, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Occupational Safety and Health Agency. Globally, the PHS cooperated with the World Health Organization, a United Nations agency. From small beginnings, public health had emerged as a major governmental responsibility as the twenty‐first century dawned.
See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Health and Human Services); Health and Fitness; Hospitals; Immigration; Immigration Law; Industrial Diseases and Hazards; Mather, Increase and Cotton; Professionalization; Pure Food and Drug Act; Tobacco Products; Tuskegee Experiment; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Charles E. Rosenberg , The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866, 1962.
Judith Walzer Leavitt , The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform, 1982.
Allan M. Brandt , No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880, 1985.
Stuart Galishoff , Newark, the Nation's Unhealthiest City, 1832–1895, 1988.
John Duffy , The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health, 1990.
Margaret Humphreys , Yellow Fever in the South, 1992.

Stuart Galishoff

Hide all research tools
Print this article Print all entries for this topic Cite this article Link to this article
Link to this article

CloseClose

Create a link to this page

Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:

<a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/.aspx#1O119-PublicHealth" title="Facts and information about public health">public health</a>

Add this article to Del.icio.usBookmark this article on DiigoShare this article on FacebookSubmit this article to RedditGive this article a thumbs-up on StumbleUpon
Show all research tools

Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

  • MLA
  • Chicago
  • APA

Paul S. Boyer. "Public Health." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Oxford University Press. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. 8 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

Paul S. Boyer. "Public Health." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Oxford University Press. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. (November 8, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-PublicHealth.html

Paul S. Boyer. "Public Health." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Oxford University Press. 2001. Retrieved November 08, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-PublicHealth.html

Learn more about citation styles

Facts and information from other sites

Related articles from newspapers, magazines, and more

Accenture Launches Innovation Center for Health to Generate Unique Insights and Offer Breakthrough Health Industry Strategies and Solutions.
Newspaper article from: Health & Medicine Week; 11/9/2009; 478 words ; ...Management, Other Technology, Practice Management, Health, Hospitals, Public Policy and, Accenture, Data Management, Health, Hospitals, Other Technology, Practice Management, Public Policy and, Technology. This article was prepared...
Health Promotion Integrated Into a Thai PharmD Curriculum to Improve Pharmacy Practice Skills
Magazine article from: American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education; 9/1/2009; ; 700+ words ; ...ability to promote patients' health as part of their pharmacy practice...experience in which students provided health information and counseling to the public; (2) academic debates on...experience, PharmD curriculum, health promotion, Thailand INTRODUCTION...
PUBLIC HEALTH & WELLNESS ANNOUNCES FIRST H1N1 VACCINE CLINICS
News Wire article from: US Fed News Service, Including US State News; 11/5/2009; 700+ words ; ...Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness will hold its first...first responders The Department of Public Health and Wellness has 15,000 vaccine...in the upcoming weeks," said Public Health and Wellness Director Dr. Adewale...
HEALTH DEPARTMENT HOLDS FIRST OF SEVERAL SCHOOL AGED CHILDREN H1N1 FLU VACCINE CLINICS; PREPARING FOR NOV. 7
News Wire article from: US Fed News Service, Including US State News; 11/5/2009; 666 words ; ...further information, feel free to the Health Department website at http://www.longbeach.gov//health, or call the Immunization Program...570-4212, or call the 24 hour Public Health Information line at (562) 570...
HEALTH FAIR PLANNED FOR BERKELEY COUNTY COMMUNITY
News Wire article from: US Fed News Service, Including US State News; 11/5/2009; 403 words ; ...Campus is hosting a community health fair on Saturday, Nov. 21...The event is free, and the public is invited to attend the health fair to learn about improving...financial, personal and home health. Vendors will provide demonstrations...
Pelosi Halloween Health Announcement Hides a Trick on American Gun Owners, says Washington Senior Rights Activist.
Newspaper article from: Managed Care Weekly Digest; 11/9/2009; 700+ words ; ...Congress, people could be denied health coverage simply because they...gun ownership constitutes a health hazard. This would be a sleazy...since Obama became president. "Public opinion polls show Americans...John M. Snyder, Insurance, Health Insurance. This article was...
Travel Health Watch.
Magazine article from: Airguide Online; 10/19/2009; 700+ words ; New York (AirGuide - Travel Health Watch) Oct 18, 2009 The Air Canada...Canada pilots point out that, at a public hearing into the February fatal crash...hub of the world. The Ministry of Health (MOH) [ETH] UAE licensed portal...
VETERANS HEALTH ADMINISTRATION ISSUES DIRECTIVE REGARDING STAFFING PLANS
News Wire article from: US Fed News Service, Including US State News; 11/5/2009; 700+ words ; ...that describe a patient's health status or level of functioning following or during an episode of health care or components of care delivery...and is not available to the public. (4) Performance Measures...distinct units of patient or health services are provided. These...
UAW health trust hires investment chief.(NEWS)
Magazine article from: Automotive News; 11/2/2009; 700+ words ; ...Employee Benefits Security Administration, which must approve the exemption, has opened a 45-day period for each proposal for public comments. GM filed its proposal in September; Chrysler's proposal was filed in October. The VEBA was created through labor...
PA Department of Health: National Delays in H1N1 Flu Vaccine Distribution Highlight Need for Continued Prevention Efforts.
Newspaper article from: Pediatrics Week; 11/14/2009; 700+ words ; ...local, county and municipal health departments to help reach the...provider, please call 1-877-PA HEALTH or visit www.H1N1inPA.com...may be several months away. Public vaccination clinics will be...Pediatrics, Vaccination, Women's Health, Pennsylvania Department of...

Pictures from Google Image Search

Click to see an enlarged picture
Click to see an enlarged picture
Click to see an enlarged picture

For students and teachers!

Encyclopedia.com provides students and teachers facts, information, and biographies from verified, citable sources, including:

Encyclopedia.com provides students and teachers facts, information, and biographies from verified, citable sources, including: