PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alison Bashford
AU  - Carolyn Strange
TI  - Thinking historically about public health
AID  - 10.1136/jmh.2006.000251
DP  - 2007 Dec 01
TA  - Medical Humanities
PG  - 87--92
VI  - 33
IP  - 2
4099  - http://mh.bmj.com/content/33/2/87.short
4100  - http://mh.bmj.com/content/33/2/87.full
SO  - J Med Humanit2007 Dec 01; 33
AB  - This paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of historic infectious disease management make this evident: they confirm that prior practices inhere in current perceptions and policies, which, like their antecedents, unfold amidst shifting amalgams of politics, culture, law and economics. Thus, explaining public health policy of the past purely in medical or epidemiological terms ignores evidence that it was rarely, if ever, designed solely on medical grounds at the time.