LECTURE

DATE LECTURER2/7/2013 Aaron Pascal Mauck, MA, PhD

GLOBAL AND LOCAL public health

....HISTORY OF SCIENCE 148

STRUCTURE OF LECTURE

I. Race and Space Continued

II. Histories of Public Health

III. Empire as Sanitary Laboratory

II. Racializing Social Distance

Careful organization and policing of spaces where colonizers and

colonized interact

Special danger in physical contact

Between the bodies of colonizers and colonized (threat of pollution)

Characteristic of racialized hierarchies in noncolonial settings

(Jim Crow South)

III. Medicalizing Social Distance

Medicine allows a specific metonymic relationship to develop between racialized bodies based on their bodily substances

Pollution takes the specific form of dangerous bodily substances with a premium placed on their control

Laboratories and hospitals become spaces for handling dangerous substances in ways that control and reduce this danger

II. Histories of Public Health

Nineteenth Century Theories of Disease

Contagion, Miasma, Zymosis, Predisposition

Despite differences in theories of etiology, allShare a similar view of the diseased body

-No disease specificity-Health constitutes an unstable equilibrium-Intimate relationship between mind, body, and environment (6 non-naturals)

Entails a shift in focus from Diseased Bodies to DiseasedPopulations

Edwin Chadwick: Involved in reform of poor laws in England during 1830s. Differentiates working and non-working poor

Sees poverty as environmentally connected to disease with non-working poor as the central agents and victims of disease

Urbanization and industrialization produce pathological environments. Eliminating such environments becomes central public health taskEdwin Chadwick, 1800-1890

Translating Disease Theory into

Public Health

MAP OF CHOLERAENGLAND, 1849

TIME MAP OF CHOLERA EPIDEMIC, 1848-9

BRITISH CARTOON, 1848

JOHN SNOW:SPOT MAPBROAD ST. PUMP

JOHN SNOW:WATER-BORN HYPOTHESIS, 1854

ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS, MODEL VILLAGE, C. WWI

MICROSCOPIC COMPONENTS OF CHOLERA WARD AIR 1854

CHOLERA AND THE FORMATION OF THE NEW YORK BOARD OF HEALTH, 1866

“Germ Theory”~1870 – Present

-Aligns aspects of Contagionist, Miasmatic, and Predispositionist Frameworks

-Simplifies causal explanations, but must align with dominant cultural beliefs about the origins and control of disease

Sanitation and MunicipalImprovements (Miasma)

Nutrition & Improvements in Social Conditions (Predisposition)

Quarantine & Isolation (contagionist)

Germ Theory

Environment that sanitary engineering could manipulate was expanded to include bodies of the afflicted

Greater alignment between medicine and public health

AMERICAN SANITARY ENGINEERING TEXT, 1880s

ROBERT KOCH WITH GERMAN CHOLERA EXPEDITION, ALEXANDRIA, 1884

III. Empire as Sanitary Laboratory

PORTABLE CHOLERA LABORATORY, 1893

MODEL VILLAGES, ROYAL MEDICAL CORPS, 1914

PLAGUE ENFORCEMENT, HONG KONG, 1894

PLAGUE ENFORCEMENT, HONG KONG, 1894

YELLOW FEVER ZONE, SANTIAGO DE CUBA, 1908

FROM PERIPHERY TO METROPOLISHERMAN BIGGS AND WILLIAM GORGAS, 1915

"Public health is purchasable. Within natural limitations, a community can determine its own death rate”

SUMMARY

Techniques and practices of modern public health did not merely develop in Europe and North America to be exported to the rest of the world

Many elements of modern public health infrastructure--e.g., permanent boards of health, coordinated sanitary control over water supply, waste removal--were developed in response to concerns over globalized disease patterns such as cholera

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonial territories served as laboratories--of both microbiological and social varieties--for sanitary research and practice.

Practical and administrative techniques of metropolitan public health were developed at imperial peripheries

I