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American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics

American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics

Current price: $35.94
Publication Date: May 18th, 2021
Publisher:
University of California Press
ISBN:
9780520379404
Pages:
424
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Description

A history of U.S. public health emergencies and how we can turn the tide.

Despite enormous advances in medical science and public health education over the last century, access to health care remains a dominant issue in American life. U.S. health care is often hailed as the best in the world, yet the public health emergencies of today often echo the public health emergencies of yesterday: consider the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 and COVID-19, the displacement of the Dust Bowl and the havoc of Hurricane Maria, the Reagan administration’s antipathy toward the AIDS epidemic and the lack of accountability during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
 
Spanning the period from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson to that of Donald Trump, American Health Crisis illuminates how—despite the elevation of health care as a human right throughout the world—vulnerable communities in the United States continue to be victimized by structural inequalities across disparate geographies, income levels, and ethnic groups. Martin Halliwell views contemporary public health crises through the lens of historical and cultural revisionings, suturing individual events together into a narrative of calamity that has brought us to our current crisis in health politics. American Health Crisis considers the future of public health in the United States and, presenting a reinvigorated concept of health citizenship, argues that now is the moment to act for lasting change.

About the Author

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester. He has authored and edited fourteen books, including Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970; Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970–2000; and The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health.
 

Praise for American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics

"An ambitious work. . . .a book on public health can and should only be written in a way that is as inclusive, reflective, accessible in language, and structured as Halliwell’s. It is an important read for any practitioner of public health."
— Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly

"Noteworthy."
— American Historical Review