Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, Brooklyn College/Urban Epidemics (Fall 2013)/Course description

Public health, its institutions and policies, focuses on disease, illness, injury and death in a community or some other polity. In its modern form, public health has its origins in the rapid, massive urbanization, often associated with industrialization, that occurred in the US and on the continent of Europe during the 19th century. The population of these cities suffered devastating epidemics and a stunningly high endemic rate of disease. Public health practitioners developed a quantitative technology to characterize the morbidity and mortality they perceived, and they mobilized state and private resources to decrease both. In their actions, as in their perceptions, these practitioners were deeply influenced by contemporary factors and forces. Beginning in the 19th century, this course will trace the history of public health through various phases, periods characterized by changing social organization, disease patterns, disease theories, populations of interest, technology, professional training, cultural values and social expectations.

The objective of this course is to examine both the science and technology developed or adopted by public health and the social factors that may have contributed to the evolution of such science and technology. Because public health issues and crises were (and are) not unique to a single city, we will look at how New York and other urban centers reacted to disease and how other municipalities may have influenced our own. To elucidate public health questions, we will have recourse to epidemiological concepts.

At the heart of the course are three questions to which you should continually return. First, what is the social and environmental basis for the existence of disease? Specifically, how does the organization of society at a particular point in time facilitate or create the conditions for the patterns of pathology and death found in its populations? Secondly, why does a society frame disease as it does and how does that social construction of disease change over time? Finally, what factors influence society’s response to perceived problems of disease and death? Such factors include dominant scientific and technological conceptions, as well as politics, culture, economics, class, race, gender.

Although primarily concerned with the social history of urban public health, the course will also refer to present public health issues. We will examine whether, and to what extent, they are heir to the public health past.

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