Writing Public Health History: The Need for a Social Scaffolding

Abstract

John Duffy's two-volume compendium of public health events in the nation's largest city and Stuart Galishoff's account of turn-of-the-century Newark, New Jersey, offer examples of some of the work now appearing in the field of American public health history. Both concentrate on the problems of a single city. Both also focus primarily on departments of public health and their efforts at identifying and solving health problems rather than on efforts of the private sector. They record changes over time in local governments' perceptions of what constituted health problems, in how governments took responsibility for alleviating health problems, and in what solutions were offered. The books differ considerably on the time period covered and on the amount of detail provided, if for no other reason than as a function of their length. Duffy offers us a study of encyclopedic proportions. Certainly the most comprehensive and detailed history of public health in any American city now available, or likely ever to be available, the two volumes represent an enormous amount of time and effort. Beginning with the Dutch settlement and following through to the 1960s, these books present a chronicle of New York City's health conditions and the city's efforts to control them. Responding to one disaster after another, New York coped with its health-related problems. Duffy tells us of them all and of the city's attempts at solving them, dividing his story in the year 1866, when a