Chapter 7 annotation

Berridge, Virginia. (2016). Public Health: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, United Kingdom. Retrieved from Oxford University Press.

                Berridge takes the realm of public health back to hundreds of centuries ago. She explains that we need to go back to the origins of cities and towns to truly understand how it all started. Times of war, economic hardship, and recessions helped to shape public health and how we see it today. For instance, scientific data helped to understand the quantities of people who were getting sick in a area or how many fatalities during battle. The threat of disease and death has targeted the public for centuries thus making public health an important topic over communities especially during times of reform. Early communities focused on this priority by creating drainage systems for restrooms, hallways and corridors that kept food from feces, and people, and clean water supplies everyone could reach. Dating back to ancient Greece and Roman times philosophers, doctors, and knowledgeable men wrote thesis on papers on how to keep the public clean and healthy. Physicians like the famous Hippocrates helped to create what modern medicine is today in his “Hippocratic Writings” that cover a wide range explaining diseases and their diagnoses to prevention of said diseases. He was extremely knowledgeable of what it took to be a healthy being including a balanced diet, meditation, and exercise. The Romans were also conscious of the public health within their communities and learned much from their Greek brothers. As their writings were transferred all over the world new theorists and physicians began to add to their writings improve the wealth of this knowledge.

Industrialization and urbanization of the 19^th century skyrocketed the amount of people and diseases in cities. There was little to no sanitation due to the copious amounts of people and small housing. People threw their trash and feces out their door which led to it feeding into the water drains, sewage systems, and spread around the streets all over cities. Overcrowding and slum conditions led to epidemics of diseases and theories of how they came to be. The public health change of the 19^th century highlighted the connection between poverty and its relationship to economic development and therefore the downfall. The Poor Law reform was enacted and highlighted the connection between poverty and disease which caused for serious reform and regulations that changed Britain forever. Vaccinations for diseases and sexual health were also two areas of reconstruction during this time that were deemed of significance. Germ theory, also known as bacteriology, became a widespread theory to most diseases. This in turn helped to cure and theorize the start of a disease, prevention, and how to cure it or protect yourself from it.

                It’s extremely interesting to me to know that so many centuries ago ancient Greeks and Romans were learning this information just from human knowledge alone. They are the creators of modern medicine and how and why did this come to be? How did their knowledge of the human body alone serve to communicate that within each person our health should be dictated as one and therefore can be treated as one if a disease or ailment falls on them? It never ceases to amaze me the knowledge they had to be able to theorize and predict and create treatments, and books, and everything else they ever imagined. I hope to use this information to strengthen my theory that those who live in poverty tend to be unhealthier than those who don’t live in poverty. This is because these communities don’t have access to education, healthcare, and are usually under tremendous amounts of stress due to their social ranking.