History in Public Health: a New Development for History?

Abstract

Historians, by and large, operate among their own kind. Most professional historians work in departments which are discipline based, although often with contacts and networks among a wider range of interests relevant to their research speciality. Medical and other health-related schools, where they draw on history, as in teaching, tend to look within their own ranks. The history of public health might well be the responsibility of a non-historical staff member with an interest in the subject. It is rare for historians, in the UK at least, to cross the boundary and to be located in a medical or public health setting. This is the position of the history group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Operating across the boundaries in this way requires a complex balancing act of interests. This paper reflects on the history of public health and possibilities for future development both from the perspective of that unusual location, but personally from that of a research career which has partially been spent in other non-historical contexts elsewhere as well. I aim to consider three related but different areas of interest public health history (by which I mean the current state of play of historical research in this and allied subjects) and history in public health (by which I mean the interest in and use of that history by non