Editorials

New public health and old rhetoric

Academically the discipline was buried repeatedly because it produced "mere rhetoric."^2,3 The first time this happened was before the turn of the 19th century. The successful hygienic and sanitarian movement of the middle of that century divorced itself from bacteriology, the upcoming science of the 1880s, because bacteriology could not really explain why epidemics happened at certain places and certain times and to certain people. The members of the movement had a point, in retrospect, but their adamant opposition to the new science led to their academic downfall and even ridicule. Hygienism was seen as only "soft" rhetoric, while "hard" bacteriological science would give the real explanations. Nobody had proved hygienists . . . [Full text of this article]

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New public health Don't judge the rest on the rhetoric of new public health

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