C5. Roundtable New Directions in the History of Public Health in the Nineteenth Century: Reflections on the Work of Christopher Hamlin Chair: Jacob Steere-Williams, College of Charleston David Barnes, University of Pennsylvania
Ian Burney, University of Manchester
Graham Mooney, Johns Hopkins University
Sarah Naramore, Northwest Missouri State University
Nicholas Bonneau, University of Maryland
This Roundtable brings together a range of scholars to consider new methods, questions, and sources for exploring the history of public health in the long nineteenth century. A sharp historiographical turn in the late 1990s saw historians move away from administrative and technical histories of public health towards a bottom-up revisionism that coalesced around the question: public health…but for whom? Long wedded to the idea that public health arose in the Global North in response to infectious disease crisis and ecological breakdowns caused by industrial capitalism, scholars began to ask new questions about surveillance, technocracy, and contested knowledge. More recently, historians of public health have worked to understand the global entanglements of western public health and the ways in which human and environmental disasters are bound with shifting ideas of the built and natural environments—urban and rural, local and global.
Our launching point is a reconsideration of the breadth and impact of the work of Christopher Hamlin, who has done more than anyone in the last thirty years to push historiographical boundaries in this field. We bring together scholars at various career stages who have been influenced by Hamlin’s work to engage in a conversation about where the history of nineteenth-century public health stands today and where it is heading in the future. While scholarly attention has increasingly shifted to the twentieth century in the past two decades, there is a growing consensus—particularly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—that we still have much to learn about the global development of public health in the age of industrialization, imperialism, and the birth of laboratory medicine. Topics in this forum cover the gamut of Hamlin’s influence, including new work in the history of disease (Jacob Steere-Williams), epistemology and politics (David Barnes), forensic medicine (Ian Burney), health and nationalism (Sarah Naramore), surveillance technology (Graham Mooney) and public health and demography (Nicholas Bonneau).
1: To engage with new theoretical and methodological approaches in the history of 19th century public health
2: To push historiographical boundaries in studying 19th century public health by bringing together a wide-range of scholars from different institutions and at various career stages.
3: To provide new insight on sources, teaching methods, and topics for understanding the contemporary relevance of 19th century public health.
