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4883 Social Change PT bjl.qxd 13/6/07 11:07 Page 90 6 Public health On 27 February 1873, William Corcoran, a baker in Tuam, Co. Galway, summoned the doctor to look at his 22–year-old assistant William Burke. The doctor took one look, diagnosed smallpox and ordered young William to the local workhouse hospital. Instead, however, Corcoran brought him to the railway station and settled him on the train home to Athenry. By the time William Burke died, some days later, a full-scale public health alert was in place. Kineen’s hotel in Athenry was closed by public
In 1945, a civic committee in rural Blue Earth County, Minnesota, announced that ‘Democracy trains its microscope on government in Blue Earth County’. 1 The group decided to focus on public health as a small-scale model for investigating intergovernmental relations. Small rural towns and villages provided minimal health services, and the Blue Earth County Council on
33 2 Governing public health in England and Denmark The aim of this chapter is to provide a solid understanding of the historical and political contexts of the obesity and recovery-orientated interventions analysed in the proceeding chapter. The wider purpose of this historical and political contextualization is to get a better insight into the ways in which health promotion is unfolding in England and Denmark. This implies grasping both the essential differences and the many similarities. Accordingly, this chapter looks at both the similarities and the main
Eijkman connect to the leitmotivs of this chapter. We argue that the emergence of public healthcare in Belgium cannot be seen apart from cross-border exchanges, scientific innovations, social reform ambitions but also inter- and intra-imperial dynamics. Although Belgian history of medicine and public health is clearly intertwined with dynamics that go beyond the borders of states
Colonial powers commonly regarded their medical and public health programmes as a form of compensation for the hardships caused by their colonisation of African peoples. 1 By the early 1940s the Belgians were proud of their colonial medical services in the Congo which they considered to be an outstanding feature of their ‘civilising mission’. The history of medical services in the
8 Joanne Wilson and Lindsay Prior Neoliberal governmentality and public health policy in Ireland Introduction Since 1994 the Irish government has developed policies that set out its vision, priorities and direction for improving and sustaining the health of its people. This chapter critically appraises how these strategies have been configured to structure responsibility for health. Informed by the work of Rose and colleagues (Rose, 1999, 2000; Rose and Miller, 2010; Rose, O’Malley and Valverde, 2006), our analysis exposes a number of key characteristics of
13 1 Critical studies of the politics of public health promotion Over the years, public health promotion has received critical attention from a wide range of academic scholars and disciplinary approaches. Much of the critique has evolved within the medical community, in which debates have taken place over the lacking (evidence of the) efficacy of specific clinical interventions and procedures (Minkler, 1999; Jackson, Waters, and Taskforce, 2005; Brownson, Baker, Leet, Gillespie, and True, 2011), and not least the tendency of medical interventions to focus
3 Labour colonies and public health As well as the unemployed, labour colonies were also directed towards those who could not work for other reasons. Large numbers of people with physical or mental disabilities or impairments found themselves in workhouses, often classed together – idiots, the feeble-minded, cripples, inebriates, or simply old1 – as incapable of earning a living in the open labour market. Increasingly, though, the workhouse was viewed as entirely inappropriate for these groups, whose vulnerability was seen as a legitimate basis for intervention
Since the 1980s two simultaneous processes took place that reflect the emergence of violence as a public health problem in Latin America. First, these decades witnessed an increase in the volume of scientific literature related to violence, as well as in a wide range of publications by national and international organisations (such as the World Health Organization, the Pan American
7 The cholera epidemic of 1892 and its impact on modernising public health and nursing in Hamburg Mathilde Hackmann Introduction ‘We are glad to send nurses to Hamburg, to help colleagues on the intensive care units caring for seriously ill patients’: This statement was given by nurse director Edgar Reisch from the university hospital in Heidelberg on 8 June 2011 after the nurse director of the university hospital in Hamburg had asked for help.1 In May 2011 northern Germany experienced an enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) epidemic. Approximately ninety