At the recent Mises Institute Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina Tom Woods made some flattering comments about Yours Truly regarding my 2000 book coauthored with James T. Bennett entitled
From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (Transaction Publishers). That’s the year 2000, not 2020. Tom’s comment was the result of his discovery that my coauthor and I had smoked out the dishonesty and left-wing political gimmickry of the “public health establishment” nearly a quarter of a century ago.
The “public health” movement was created shortly after the Civil War with the creation of state and local government “health departments” that concentrated on sanitation issues, disease research, enforcing quarantines, inoculations, controlling mosquitoes, waste disposal, swamp drainage, immunizations, and attempting to control communicable diseases in general. The American Public Health Association (APHA) was founded in 1872 as a trade association for public health professionals. It is almost shocking today to read about how post Civil War cities in America were full of such things as pig pens, cesspools, privy vaults, and manure piles!
For the first several decades of its existence the presidents of the APHA were all people with scientific training – surgeons, medical statisticians, chemists, sanitarians, experts in bacteriology, hygiene, anatomy, and even botany. Great progress was made in controlling diseases and eradicating some of them, like Yellow Fever, and improving mortality rates. Economic growth surely played an important role as well, enabling Americans to attain better nutrition and living standards in general.
By the 1950s the dire problems that existed in the post-war years had pretty much disappeared, confronting the public health establishment with a major dilemma: With its mission essentially accomplished, how would it continue to justify its existence and its tax-funded support?
Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” explosion of welfare state spending during the 1960s provided the answer. The federal government’s “Kerner Report” of 1968 on the “root causes” of poverty was fully embraced by the APHA. In doing so the public health establishment changed its focus entirely from controlling disease to creating a healthy society through welfare statism. The goal was no longer enhancing individual health but “curing” society’s ills. That’s where the big tax money was. Fewer and fewer medical and health professionals were among “public health” professionals, with more and more lobbyists, political activists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists. The public health establishment began crusading for increased welfare payments, a guaranteed annual income “for all Americans,” government housing subsidies, racial hiring quotas, and school busing.
Hellbound and Down 