Changing Definitions of the History of Public Health

Abstract

This article examines the transformation from earlier to contemporary historiographical interpretations of the development of public health systems in relation to the construction of political states. It reviews the changing foci of histories of epidemic and chronic diseases and argues that this work has been central to expanding the conceptual basis for public health history as the ’history of collective actions in relation to the health of populations’. The article subsequently argues that, therefore, public health history is inherently bound to the history of political collectivism as a form of knowledge constructed through systems of ideological belief.