Shifting Boundaries of Public Health: Europe in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The history of public health, like many other histories, has tended to be a thing of shreds and patches, with a focus on local and national experiences, and mainly on the nineteenth century. We know a good deal about the sanitary movement and state medicine in Victorian Britain, something of developments in various European nations, a little of what went on in a number of America states and non-Western nations, and broadly speaking what provisions were made federally in the USA. For the most part, the twentieth century is even more patchily covered than the nineteenth, especially for the period after 1940. With the rise of global history—or connected history, or world history—and the passing of the twentieth century, broader perspectives are now beginning to emerge, but location remains a central issue in health history: diseases do appear in one place and spread to others, administrations tend to be geographically bounded, demographic statistics to be compiled from local returns. And as the editors of Shifting Boundaries point out in their intelligent and historiographically well-grounded introduction, ‘place’ has emerged in the last 25 years as a key concept for a range of disciplines from literature to anthropology. The concept of place allows connexion between the local and the global (or international), with space for the nation between these two poles; ‘place’ as ‘site’ encompasses not only disease but sites of responsibility—government and non-government structures, expert groups and knowledge systems—and notions of fluidity, of borders that are ‘impermanent and porous’ (p. 3). Place, then, provides the thematic unity of this volume.

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