Dona Schneider

Public health as a discipline grew out of traditional Western medicine but expanded to include interests in social policy, hygiene, epidemiology, infectious disease, sanitation, and health education. This book, the first of a two-volume set, is a collection of important and representative historical texts that serve to trace and to illuminate the development of conceptions, policies, and treatments in public health from the dawn of Western civilization through the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century.

The editors provide annotated readings and biographical details to punctuate the historical timeline and to provide students with insights into the progression of ideas, initiatives, and reforms in the field. From Hippocrates and John Graunt in the early period, to John Snow and Florence Nightingale during the nineteenth-century sanitary reform movement, to Upton Sinclair and Margaret Sanger in the Progressive Era, readers follow the identification, evolution, and implementation of public health concepts as they came together under one discipline.

There is a mountain of statistics gathered about our children, but it is often hard to know what the numbers mean. To show how the statistics can both disguise and highlight problems, Dona Schneider alternates a discussion of the numbers with vivid encounters with individual children and adults. This book guides us through the morass of numbers bandied about to describe the state of America's children—what the numbers tell us and what they don't—and it offers a call for action. Comprehensive in its treatment of all groups of children and accessible in style, this book is essential for anyone concerned about children in American society.