HIST 3D Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Tubercle, Irregular Menstruation, Pathognomonicity
Public Health and Urban Disease: Tuberculosis
● Revolutionaries declared every citizen had a right to health, medical services, etc
- Tried to make a study of what the public’s health was
- social/economic class, conditions
- Look at a population and determine healthy vs unhealthy places and attempt to
change circumstances
- Government taking charge of the public’s health came from France
- What tended to oppose public health was laissez faire
● 1820s-1830s
- Workers and families exposed to full force of bad economic times
- Jeremy Bentham -- Utilitarians (they argued against laissez faire liberalism that it
was good not only for the people, but state as a whole to help people become
healthier)
- 1830s → 1840s: socialism (Karl Marx and Engels)
- William Farr: Paris in the late 1820s → became an expert at physical diagnosis
and was exposed to pathological anatomy; came back in 1836 around the time
that England decided to have death registration all over the country
- Doctors convinced parliament that (as a part of the registration of births and
deaths), it would be useful to look at cause of death
- Set up local registrars of death who could view the body and talk to the physician,
encourage him to make out the death certificate in order to collect information in
fine detail of what the causes of death were
- Some were epidemic; measles, smallpox, typhoid fever
- 1849 and the one examined by Snow in 1854 were made easier for him to
understand because of the system of registration
- Medical officers of health; would say that consumption (tuberculosis) was rife and
the lower classes suffered tremendously
- Model for health surveillance
- American Medical Association in 1848 recommended that the U.S. maintained
birth and death registration as was evident in England; 8 states actually
established this death registration
- Attempts to introduce surveillance and action based on surveillance was only
partial
● Savannah, Georgia 1820
- Crude death rate: 91/1000
- Most dying from diseases such as malaria and yellow fever
- Drained the swamps outside town
- Within ten years, it became 28/1000
- If you have a particularly bad place and you focus on what could be done, you
can improve the public health
● Tuberculosis
Document Summary
Revolutionaries declared every citizen had a right to health, medical services, etc. Tried to make a study of what the public"s health was social/economic class, conditions. Look at a population and determine healthy vs unhealthy places and attempt to change circumstances. Government taking charge of the public"s health came from france. What tended to oppose public health was laissez faire. Workers and families exposed to full force of bad economic times. Jeremy bentham -- utilitarians (they argued against laissez faire liberalism that it was good not only for the people, but state as a whole to help people become healthier) 1830s 1840s: socialism (karl marx and engels) William farr: paris in the late 1820s became an expert at physical diagnosis and was exposed to pathological anatomy; came back in 1836 around the time that england decided to have death registration all over the country.
