Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Public Health

Public health is both an issue of global concern as a result of the transnational spread of disease and other medical problems and a field of studies and practices that is vital to global studies. As a field, public health refers to the development and implementation of preventive medical practices within a population. Formally, the activities of public health may be defined as assessing the incidence

(i.e., number of new cases) and current state(s) of disease and injury within a population (i.e., prevalence), prolonging life through the organized use of various hygienic and medical interventions, and providing information and directing activities of the community and its individual members to make healthy lifestyle choices. Unlike other forms of medicine, public health focuses its assessment(s) and activities on groups and communities rather than on individuals.

As a profession and practice, public health entails three major approaches: epidemiology—the assessment of patterns and trends of disease and injury within particular groups and communities; biostatistics—the analytic techniques that are employed to evaluate these populational data; and health services—the implementation of health education, environmental, and behavioral modification(s), screening, immunization, occupational safety, primary care, and rehabilitative programs to effect prevention of disease, injury, and their long-term consequences for target communities. Most developed countries now have governmental agencies that oversee and administer public health programs, and several international governmental and nongovernmental organizations (e.g., World Health Organization [WHO]) are dedicated to fostering public health programs and activities in developing and nondeveloped nations in an effort to sustain health care initiatives on a global scale. This broad community-based ethic reflects the historicity and iterative canon of public health, and it gives rise to important ethical and legal issues regarding the definition of health as a public good, distribution of such goods and services, subordination of individual desires and needs to those of various levels of community, and the scope and tenor of policy and laws required to advance certain prescriptions and proscriptions about individual versus groups behaviors and practices. These factors conjoin philosophy, ethics, sociology, and law to the modern discipline of public health, and they reveal its ever-expanding and collaborative nature in dealing with preventive medicine for populations on the world stage.

Historical Background

Antiquity

Although contemporary public health was formalized as a discipline in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century, the practices and precepts that contributed to the formation of the field had roots in antiquity. Indeed, many of the prescriptions and proscriptions of ancient and newer religions were formulated to identify and sustain health-promoting (viz. salutary and salutogenic) practices regarding personal hygiene, sanitation, and environmental control. The codification of these community needs, values, and practices created a systematization through which education could be imparted, attitudes, and behaviors modified and individual activities directed so as to maintain the integrity of the community at large. Evidence for such constructs and practices can be found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, within the Hebraic traditions, China, India, and among various aboriginal cultures.

The classical cultures of Greece and Rome were characterized by both the rise of the city-state and commerce with local and nonlocal agrarian communities. The Hippocratic School instituted a transition to a naturalistic concept of bodily function, wellness, and disease. This was introduced to Rome by Asclepiades in the first century BCE, was maintained into the following century by his pupil Themison of Laodicea, and was subsequently expanded in the second century CE by Galen, who contested many of Asclepiades's teachings. One focal element of Galenic medicine was the notion of pneuma—referring not only to air and breath but also to a vital force that can transmit health or disease. The concept was important as it contributed, at least in part, to both Vitruvius's firstcentury CE descriptions of nebula—which advanced the Greek idea of miasma—noxious air that is causative of disease, and the ongoing embellishment of Roman practices of health, water use, sanitation, and waste dispersion.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution