The history and development of public health in developed countries

It has been conventional to locate the origins of public health in early efforts to combat epidemics and to regulate the sanitary environment accompanying urban life and to trace its history in the gradual evolution of such measures in relation to politics, administrative practices, public laws, and medical science’s changing aetiology. Such an historical account provides important insights and understanding but it is also de-limited in one significant sense. Public health is cast in a responsive role in relation to the processes of economic development. However, the nature of the relationship between public health and global economic development can appear very differently when it is viewed over the long-term, encompassing the whole process of modern economic transformation from the singular matrix of its origins in the early modern society and economy of England, c.1600–1800. This chapter will show that state policies to promote the social order, security, and health of the population in fact pre-date and crucially underpinned the process through which the modern world’s economic transformation originated—in early modern England.