Public Health History

What did 19th-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the 19th-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth.

Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic is a unique firsthand account from three public health leaders of CDC's early response to AIDS. Drawing in part on interviews from the CDC's AIDS oral history project, the authors trace the evolution of AIDS from newly recognized disease to pandemic.

Mosquito Warrior tells the engrossing story of General William C. Gorgas (1854-1920), the once-renowned pioneer in tropical disease research and public health. His fascinating life illuminates vast transformations in the United States. Carol R. Byerly's balanced and contemporary examination of Gorgas illuminates his complex legacy in medicine and public health, military history, and American ambitions at the dawn of United States global ascendency.

April 7 is World Health Organization Day, in honor of the day that the World Health Organization held the first World Health Assembly in 1948. International health conferences had been held nearly a century before this date, and international health organizations had been established in the half century prior to the creation of the World Health Organization, but 1948 marked the year that a formal institution was created to direct and implement a concerted and truly global effort to investigate, prevent, control, and cure disease.

The US government has always invested federal, state, and local dollars in public health protection and prevention. Despite this public funding, however, Americans typically believe the current system is predominantly comprised of private actors with little government interference. In Grow and Hide, Colleen M. Grogan details the history of the American health care state and argues that the public has been intentionally misled about the true role of government.

This definitive people’s history of the recovery movement spans the 1970s to the present day and proves to readers just how essential mental health activism is to every person in this country, whether you have a current psychiatric diagnosis or not. In Fighting for Recovery, professor and mental health advocate Phyllis Vine tells the history of the former psychiatric patients, families, and courageous activists who formed a patients’ liberation movement that challenged medical authority and proved to the world that recovery from mental illness is possible.

In Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China's emergency response to the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government's handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. Yang's research reveals that China's health experts had an excellent head start when they implemented a health emergency action program to respond to the outbreak at the end of December 2019.

The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families.

Muzzled Truth: How the California Department of Public Health Rejected COVID-19 Treatment and Vaccine Health Risks Warnings is a book revealing the actions California public health officials took before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In Muzzled Truth, you will learn about the risks associated with childhood and COVID-19 vaccines, the questionable responses made by California’s public health department, and their efforts to discourage questions.

O infectologista Stefan Cunha Ujvari trata, neste audiolivro fascinante e atualíssimo, das epidemias e pandemias mais marcantes da nossa história. Como a humanidade conviveu com essas doenças? Qual a importância das primeiras vacinas e como elas surgiram? Partindo da Grécia Antiga e chegando até os nossos dias, o audiolivro aborda doenças como peste negra, sífilis, gripe, ebola. Dedica um capítulo para a COVID-19 e mostra por que, afinal, essa doença parou o mundo.

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing.

In The End of Epidemics, leading public health authority Dr Jonathan D. Quick tells the stories of the heroes, past and present, who’ve succeeded in their fights to stop the spread of illness and death. He explains the science and the politics of combating epidemics. And he provides a detailed seven-part plan showing exactly how world leaders, health professionals, the business community, media and ordinary citizens can work together to prevent epidemics, saving millions of lives.

Bart Stupak, a nine-term Democratic Congressman from Michigan’s First Congressional District, brought two unshakable principles with him to Capitol Hill in 1992: a firm belief in the sanctity of life, and the conviction that health care was a right for all Americans and not a privilege for the fortunate few. Studies indicating that 45,000 Americans died needlessly every year for lack of access to health care inspired Congressman Stupak’s tireless efforts, often at great personal cost, to pass lifesaving legislation while remaining true to his right-to-life principles.

Dr. Lange graduated from medical school in 1981, right as a new plague swept across the globe. His story became intertwined with the story of HIV. At once a physician, scientist, AIDS activist, and medical diplomat, Lange studied ways to battle HIV and prevent its spread from mother to child. Fighting the injustices of poverty, Lange advocated for better access to health care for the poor and the vulnerable. The Impatient Dr. Lange is the story of one man's struggle against a global pandemic - and the tragic attack that may have slowed down the search for a cure.

We have entered what is called the "biological century" and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America's collective value system, our well-being, and ultimately, our future. The Body Politic is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape - one that fuels today's culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to reexamine their platforms.

For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin - a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong's tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed 10 million lives worldwide.

On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return - arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

Bill Novelli doesn't believe that retirement has to mean rocking one's way into the sunset. As the head of the strongest organization of retired people in the world, the AARP, Novelli believes that retirement can be a time of action and influence rather than one of illness and decline.

This amazing tale is the story of one of America's oldest and most unusual urban hospitals. From it's inception as a "Poor House" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. County covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds of former trainees gathered to bid it an emotional farewell.

Here we have it: We may be looking at the years 2020-2021 and think a certain virus has been bad for the world population. However, what happened in these two years is nothing, proportionally, to the hundreds of millions of people who got wiped out by rat infestations spreading insanitary bacteria, resulting in the disease and death of huge parts of the European population in the mid-centuries.