Disease and Discovery: A History of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1916-1939

by Elizabeth Fee

Overview

The story of the founding and early years of the nation’s first dedicated school of public health has been reissued to coincide with the school’s centennial celebration.

At the end of the nineteenth century, public health was the province of part-time political appointees and volunteer groups of every variety. Public health officers were usually physicians, but they could also be sanitary engineers, lawyers, or chemists—there was little agreement about the skills and knowledge necessary for practice. In Disease and Discovery, Elizabeth Fee examines the conflicting ideas about public health’s proper subject and scope and its search for a coherent professional unity and identity. She draws on the debates and decisions surrounding the establishment of what was initially known as the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first independent institution for public health research and education, to crystallize the fundamental questions of the field.

Many of the issues of public health education in the early twentieth century are still debated today. What is the proper relationship of public health to medicine? What is the relative importance of biomedical, environmental, and sociopolitical approaches to public health? Should schools of public health emphasize research skills over practical training? Should they provide advanced training and credentials for the few or simpler educational courses for the many?

Fee explores the many dimensions of these issues in the context of the founding of the Johns Hopkins school. She details the efforts to define the school’s structure and purpose, select faculty and students, and organize the curriculum, and she follows the school’s growth and adaptation to the changing social environment through the beginning of World War II. As Fee demonstrates, not simply in its formation but throughout its history the School of Hygiene served as a crucible for the forces shaping the public health profession as a whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421421100
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. Toward a New Profession of Public Health
2. Competition for the First School of Hygiene and Public Health
3. Working It Out
4. Creating New Disciplines, I
5. Creating New Disciplines, II
6. Surviving the Thirties
7. The Community as Public Health Laboratory
8. Extending the Hopkins Model
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Institutional histories are often boring [but] Elizabeth Fee's book is neither tedious nor merely fashioned for in-house consumption. In fact, developments at the Hopkins School of Hygiene are merely the platform from which the author launches into a broad investigation of early twentieth-century public health ideology in America.
—Journal of the American Medical Association

. . . remarkable . . .
—Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Fee’s book, originally published in 1987 but reissued in 2016 . . . has become one of the staples to which public health historians turn.
—Isis

From the Publisher

. . . remarkable . . .

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Institutional histories are often boring [but] Elizabeth Fee's book is neither tedious nor merely fashioned for in-house consumption. In fact, developments at the Hopkins School of Hygiene are merely the platform from which the author launches into a broad investigation of early twentieth-century public health ideology in America.

Journal of the American Medical Association

"Fee’s book, originally published in 1987 but reissued in 2016... has become one of the staples to which public health historians turn."

Isis