Medicine Atlas

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Public Health

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Origin Organized as a field in the nineteenth century sanitary reform movement, prompted by repeated cholera epidemics in industrial cities; Edwin Chadwick 1842 report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population and the resulting Public Health Act of 1848 in Britain are commonly cited founding milestones, building on the same era environmental thinking that also produced John Snow epidemiological work.

Public health is the science and practice of protecting and improving the health of whole populations, through disease prevention, sanitation, vaccination programs and policy, rather than treating individual patients one at a time. Its modern institutional form traces to nineteenth century sanitary reform movements responding to industrial urban epidemics, and it now spans epidemic and disaster response, environmental health, immunization campaigns and health education worldwide.

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Organized as a field in the nineteenth century sanitary reform movement, prompted by repeated cholera epidemics in industrial cities; Edwin Chadwick 1842 report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population and the resulting Public Health Act of 1848 in Britain are commonly cited founding milestones, building on the same era environmental thinking that also produced John Snow epidemiological work. 1
Cross-Tradition Connections

Notable Specialists

Sources
1. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity
Roy Porter, W. W. Norton and Company, 1997
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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