Public health history

• Up one level
• APHA History Project
  A project of the American Public Health Association
• *** A Road Out: Building a Road Out of Illness, of Poverty, of Hopelessness
  Director/producer/editor/writer: Karin Shapiro; Editor/director of photography: Martin Brown; Composer: Eric Kuhn. Public health in the American South was profoundly shaped by a handful of progressive public health professionals in flight from apartheid South Africa (John Cassel, Harry Phillips, Eva Salber, Beryl Slome, Cecil Slome, and Guy Steuart). A Road Out explores how the experiences of these community-focused health care providers in deeply divided societies changed our understanding of how race, poverty, and socioeconomic status shape health outcomes. The transmission of ideas from South Africa to the American South occurred amidst the Civil Rights Movement and U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty."
  The film was produced with historical and archival material as well as interviews with people who learned from and/or collaborated with the South Africans.
  (Poster)   (Trailer)
  
  *** On Wednesday, March 25, 4:00pm ET - 5:45pm/6:45pm ET, Gillings Global Health, Dean's Office, and the Department of Epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School will host a screening of A Road Out, followed by a panel discussion with Geni Eng, Sherman James, the film's director Karin Shapiro, and Suzanne Maman (Moderator). The film and panel will take place in the Blue Cross / Blue Shield Auditorium (MHRC 0001) and on Zoom, followed by a reception in the upper atrium. [Click here for a flyer with full details and registration links with QR codes]

  (There was a free screening and panel discussion on Thursday, February 19, 2026, 5:30pm at the Nasher Museum of Art with Panelists: Geni Eng, Sherman James, Lloyd Michener, Karin Shapiro, and Moderator: Gary Bennett [panelist bios].)

• Could You Starve to Death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr Controversy and the Loss of the "Social" in Public Health
  Christopher Hamlin, AJPH 1995;85(6):856-866 Abstract: The public health field has long been pulled in two directions, either toward a narrower biomedical mission to control infectious disease or toward a broader mission to address the social and economic factors that adversely affect health and wellbeing. This paper explores as an instance of this tension an 1839 controversy between the statistician William Farr and the pioneering sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick on the role of starvation as a cause of death. Farr thought hunger contribution significantly to many deaths; Chadwick wanted Farr to concentrate on the diseases from which people actually died. The paper then considers what the "constitutional" disease theories, which underlay Farr's concerns, implied for public health using medical testimony on child labor in industrial revolution factories as an illustration. An exploration of this constitutional medicine may help provide a "useable past" for modern public health workers interested in broadening the scope of public health.
• Henry Blackburn seminar on the history of epidemiology at University of Minnesota
  Includes national perspectives
• Origins of the National Black Leadership Initiative on Cancer and of the Biennial Symposium
  Lovell Jones' recollections
• The EXODUS of Public Health What History Can Tell Us About the Future
  Amy L. Fairchild, David Rosner, James Colgrove, Ronald Bayer, and Linda P. Fried. Am J Public Health. 2010 January; 100(1): 54–63. We trace the shifting definitions of the American public health profession's mission as a social reform and science-based endeavor. Its authority coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as public health identified itself with housing, sanitation, and labor reform efforts. The field ceded that authority to medicine and other professions as it jettisoned its social mission in favor of a science-based identity.
• The History of Professional Nursing in North Carolina, 1902–2002
  Phoebe Pollitt, Associate Professor of Nursing, Appalachian State University. Carolina Academic Press Durham, North Carolina, 2014
• The U.S. Healthy People Initiative: Its Genesis and Its Sustainability
  Lawrence W. Green and Jonathan Fielding. Annual Review of Public Health. Vol. 32:451-470 (Volume publication date April 2011)
  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031210-101148
  Abstract
  Unlike most government initiatives in health, the Healthy People initiative of the U.S. federal government was crafted and sustained not as a federal initiative, but as a “national initiative” eliciting participation from nongovernmental national organizations, state health agencies, professional associations, multiple agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and other federal agencies, such as Agriculture, and increasingly engaging academia and state and local stakeholders in adapting the objectives for their own efforts to enact and evaluate state and local policies and programs. The quantified objectives at the center of the initiative were a product of continuous balancing of changing science and political or social concerns and priorities along with national and state or special population needs. The evolution from the first decade's objectives to each subsequent set of objectives reflected changing societal concerns, evidence-based technologies, theories, and discourses of those decades. Such accommodations changed the contours of the initiative over time in attempts to make it more relevant to specific partners and other stakeholders.
• UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health history
  An extensive collection of documents and links to publications
• UNC Department of Epidemiology history
  Documents, images, and a booklet about the Department's first 40 years (1936-1976)