Historical epidemiology and global health history.

James Webb Jr

doi:10.1590/s0104-59702020000300002

Abstract

The subdiscipline of historical epidemiology holds the promise of creating a more robust and more nuanced foundation for global public health decision-making by deepening the empirical record from which we draw lessons about past interventions. This essay draws upon historical epidemiological research on three global public health campaigns to illustrate this promise: the Rockefeller Foundation's efforts to control hookworm disease (1909-c.1930), the World Health Organization's pilot projects for malaria eradication in tropical Africa (1950s-1960s), and the international efforts to shut down the transmission of Ebola virus disease during outbreaks in tropical Africa (1974-2019).

Highlights

The subdiscipline of historical epidemiology holds the promise of creating a more robust and more nuanced foundation for global public health decision-making by deepening the empirical record from which we draw lessons about past interventions
There are divergent opinions about when global health history began – some scholars might prefer the end of the Cold War in 1991, the creation of the World Health Organization in 1948, the creation of the Health Commission of the League of Nations in 1920, the founding of the International Health Commission of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, or an earlier date – and how global health history might best be periodized
For a field whose name suggests that one of its central concerns must be the history of health interventions, there has been a relative dearth of interest in the epidemiological dimensions of global health initiatives; that is, the empirical impacts of global health interventions on population health and the ways in which health interventions have transformed patterns of disease transmission