Urban Public HealthA Historical Perspective

Abstract

Historical perspectives on urban health focus mainly on the production of public health, on strategies and policies deployed by towns and cities that are authorized to act for the common good. This chapter gives a largely chronological perspective on public health developments, from medieval to early modern, and then to a consideration of the major shifts in public health that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although in this chapter most attention is devoted to European trends, the colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia ensured networks of knowledge that were, by contemporary standards, quite quickly disseminated, though locally taken up at very variable rates. The historical study of public health is, therefore, an inherently worldwide one, with the important qualification that the pace of change and uptake of ideas was uneven.