HIST 5110 - History of Public Health Disasters

• Define public health.
• Describe how nativism, racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia contributed to attitudes toward disease and the spread of disease in the U.S. over the last 300 years.
• Describe the historical, social, and cultural forces that shape our definition of health and our notion of ways to prevent sickness and premature death.
• Describe the role hospitals have played historically in both the spread of disease and the control of disease.
• Describe the role of transportation innovation, particularly invention of the steam engine, in the spread of epidemic disease.
• Discuss how household inventions (e.g., the ice box, refrigerator, and telephone) contributed to improvements in public health.
• Discuss the role war has played throughout U.S. history in both spreading epidemic disease and prompting innovations to treat disease.
• Explain the role cholera, typhoid, and infant diarrhea epidemics played in creating support for the nationwide construction of public health infrastructure.
• Explain the role epidemic disease has played in the destruction of traditional cultures and the death of indigenous peoples.
• Explain what has contributed to public resistance to vaccinations in the last 150 years and how this attitude has contributed to public health.
• Using historical attitudes toward cholera, gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV/AIDS as examples, explain how epidemic disease comes to be socially defined.
• Using the history of HIV/AIDS, tobacco use, illegal drug use, and obesity as examples, discuss the American propensity to assign individual, as opposed to societal, responsibility for disease occurrence and prevention.