“Public Health and the Public”

Abstract

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has brought into high relief the tensions between organizations reacting to disease outbreaks and the wider public which is drawn into these responses. Public health action requires the involvement of the public, and the public’s agreement, disagreement, or ambivalence on outbreaks and the organizations that deal with them is a factor worth examining in outbreaks of the past. Informing, educating, and persuading the public on responses to disease outbreaks remains a key component of effective action and resistance to recommendations, and the expectations of prompt mitigation, pressure and shape the tactics these organizations take. Although often conceptualized as merely the policies dictated by scientific and medical knowledge, public health recommendations are a complex mixture of what is understood about the agent causing illness, how the impact of the agent can be mitigated or prevented, what the expectations of the public are in terms of health and the organizations designed to protect them, and what actions the public is willing to accept. The papers of this panel will reflect this theme by addressing the role of the streets in the epidemiology of yellow fever in early American cities; examining the ways communication technologies—especially the telegraph—shaped understandings of disease transmission at the national and local level; United Fruit’s “goodwill tour” to recast the public’s perception of tropical fruit as a source for contagion; and mounting media and public pressure on the Centers for Disease Control during the 1976 Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Philadelphia. These historical examples will shed light on contemporary issues with disease outbreaks and public health replies.