Pioneers in Public Health ─ Lessons from History

The public health movement involved numerous individuals who made the case for change and put new practices into place. However despite a growing interest in how we understand history to inform current evidence based practice, there is no book focusing on our progressive pioneers in public health and environmental health.

This book seeks to fill that gap. It examines carefully selected public and environmental health pioneers who made a real difference to the UK’s health, some with international influence. Many of these pioneers were criticised in their life-times, yet they had the strength of character to know what they were doing was fundamentally right and persevered, often against many odds. Including Chapters on:

• Thomas Fressh
• John Snow
• Duncan of Liverpool
• Margaret McMillan
• George Cadbury
• Christopher Addison
• Margery Spring Rice and others.

This book will help readers place pioneers in a wider context and to make more sense of their academic and practitioner work today; how evidence (and what was historically understood by it) underpins modern day practice; and how these visionary pioneers developed their ideas into practice, some not fully appreciated until after their own deaths. Pioneers in Public Health sets the tone for a renewed focus on research into evidence based public and environmental health, which has become subject of growing international interest in recent years.

Jill Stewart worked as an Environmental Health Officer specialising in private sector housing for several years before becoming a lecturer in London Universities teaching housing, public health, environmental health and social work at undergraduate and post graduate levels. She is a Corporate Member of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, a Fellow of both the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health and the Royal Geographical Society and an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Housing.