Nothing new under the sun: public health reinventing itself in economically challenging times.

摘要

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM dictates that today we are bigger, faster, and better at practically everything compared with our predecessors of yesteryear. Seemingly true for athletics and business, public health and its practice cannot be excluded from such a sweeping societal truism. Nonetheless, our contemporary-centric focus on events swirling around us often results in a myopic analysis that neglects critical historical perspective. The excerpted article by C.-E.A. Winslow recounts 15 years (1920-1935) of groundbreaking efforts spearheaded by the Committee on Administrative Practice (CAP) of the American Public Health Association designed to bring public health practice into the gilded modem age. Reviewing this prolific and progressive body of work, it is easy to overlook that these efforts occurred nearly a century ago during the height of our nation's Great Depression.