History of Public Health

George Rosen's wide-ranging account of public health's long and fascinating history is an indispensable classic.

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.

George Rosen (1910–1977), MD, MPH, PhD, was a professor of health education at the School of Public Health and Administrative Medicine, Columbia University, and the editor of the American Journal of Public Health.

Elizabeth Fee is the chief historian at the National Library of Medicine. She is the coeditor of AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease, Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist, Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine, and many other works.