Preventive Medicine and Public Health

The United States Public Health Service.

The discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 1870s provided a scientific foundation for preventive medicine and public health. Early public health efforts were directed at cleaning up the environment, and public health was more closely associated with engineering than with medicine. With the development of bacteriology in the late nineteenth century, the theory and practice of public health and its relationship to medicine changed. Although American physicians were relative latecomers to the field of microbiological research, they led their European counterparts in applying the new science to the advancement of public health. As originators of the public health bacteriological laboratory, American public health officials concentrated their battles on particular pathogenic organisms, and attention shifted from the environment to the infected individual. The earliest...

[The entire page is 1748 words long]

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