Session 3: Public Health Practice
Session 3: Public health practice
Session leader(s)
Jane Brooks
Session outline
This session will examine the impetus for public health policies and practice and its impact upon the nation
Aims
- To examine public health reports and laws arising from fears of the ‘health of the nation' and their impact upon the nursing and midwifery professions
- To explore the sanitary thesis by which nursing gained its place in public healthcare, both in Britain and its Colonies
Content of session
- Public health commissions, reports and statute from 1848 - present
- The Boer War and the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration
- Domestic education, mothercraft, eugenics, contraception, voluntary sterilisation of the ‘unfit'
- George Rosenberg on Florence Nightingale, miasmas, public sanitation and private cleanliness, germ theory
- Health visiting, district midwives, Queen's Jubilee Nurses, school nurses.
- Florence Nightingale on the Aboriginal question, missionary nursing. Colonial Nursing Service, Plunkett Nurses in New Zealand, Bush and Frontier Nurses
Teaching methods
Pre-reading, tutorial, seminar presentations
Indicative reading
Davin A (1978) Imperialism and Motherhood History Workshop Journal, 5, 9-65.
Denny E (1997) The Second Missing Link: Bible Nursing in the Nineteenth-Century Journal of Advanced Nursing, 26, 1175-1182.
Digby A & Stewart J (eds.) Gender, Health and Welfare Routledge, London.
Dowling W C (1963) The Ladies' Sanitary Association and the Origins of the Health
Visiting Service, University of London, London (unpublished MA thesis)
Farrell L A (1985) The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement, 1865-1925, Garland Publishing, New York.
Gittins D (1982) Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure, 1900 - 1939, Hutchinson, London.
Grier J (1998) Eugenics and birth control: Contraceptive provision in North Wales, 1918-1939 Social History of Medicine, 11, 443-458.
Jones G (1986) Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain, Croom Helm, London.
Kelsey A (1999) The Evolving and Uncertain Role of Health Visiting in England and
Wales in the Twentieth Century London, London School of Economics [unpublished PhD thesis]
Koven, S. Michel, S. (eds.) (1993) Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare States, London, Routledge.
Lewis J (1986) What Price Community Medicine? The Philosophy, Practice and Politics of Public Health since 1919, Wheatsheaf Books, Brighton.
MacNichol J (1989) Eugenics and the campaign for voluntary sterilisation in Britain between the wars The Society for the Social History of Medicine., 147-169.
Nightingale F (1891-1892) Health at Home: Report of the Training of Rural Health
Missioners and of Their Village Lecturing and Visiting under North Bucks
Technical Education Committee of the Bucks County Council Edwin J French
Nightingale F (1893) Sick-Nursing and Health-Nursing. In: Burdett-Coutts B (ed.) Woman's Mission: A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic Work of Women Sampson Low, Marston & Company Ltd., London LMA: H1/ST/NC/7/15.
Porter D (1999) Health, Civilisation and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times, Routledge, London.
Rafferty A M, Robinson J & Elkan R (eds.) (1997) Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare, Routledge, London.
Rosenberg C E (1979) Florence Nightingale on contagion: The hospital as moral universe. In: Rosenberg C E (ed.) Healing and History: Essays for Charles Rosen, Science History Publications, Dawson.
Stopes M (1923) Early Days of Birth Control, G P Putnam's Sons, London.
Stopes M C (1931) A Letter to Working Mothers: On How to Have Healthy Children and Avoid Unwanted Pregnancies, The Mothers' Clinic for Constructive Birth Control, London.
Stopes M C (none) What is Constructive Birth Control, CBC Pamphlet, London.
Welshman J (1996) In search of the 'problem family': Public health and social work in England and Wales, 1940-1970 The Society for the Social History of Medicine, 9, 447-465.
