This book is intended to provide a basic introduction to epidemiologic methods and epidemiologic thinking. After reading this book, you should be able to read an epidemiologic study, understand what the authors did and why, and identify what they found. You will also have the tools to assess the quality of that study—how good is the evidence? What are potential sources of bias, and how might those have affected the results? This book will not teach you enough to be able to design and conduct your own epidemiologic studies—that level of understanding requires several years of specialized training. However, being able to read and understand the scientific literature about human health will allow you to apply that understanding to your own work in a nuanced, sophisticated way.

This textbook provides a contextualized approach to a Western civilization historical survey course, focusing on the modern history of medicine in Europe, North America, and the colonial world from 1700 to the present. The textbook emphasizes how disease classifications and medical and sanitation practices are framed within their social and cultural contexts, and how ideas about bodies, disease, disability, health, and healing have been associated historically with such factors as race and ethnicity, religion, social class, and gender. Some major themes include diverse perspectives and conflicts in the progress and triumph of modern medical science and the identification of historical patterns in modern medical identities, practices, issues and controversies.

The book seeks to develop historical awareness of major events and ideas that have shaped the evolution of Western medical and public health practices in the modern era as well as ideas about disease and disability, and to enhance critical thinking and writing skills to engage in the analysis of historical and contemporary issues.

Chapter files of this book are also available in PDF format in the CSCC Hub.

A History of Western Medicine, Disease and Public Health, vol. 2 (Since 1700) by Dea Boster, Benjamin Pugno at Columbus State Community College is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA except where otherwise noted.

A History of Western Medicine, Disease and Public Health, vol. 2 (Since 1700) is a textbook providing a contextualized approach to a Western civilization historical survey course, focusing on the modern history of medicine in Europe, North America, and the colonial world from 1700 to the present.

Introducing public health ethics poses two special challenges. First, it is a relatively new field that combines public health and practical ethics. Its unfamiliarity requires considerable explanation, yet its scope and emergent qualities make delineation difficult. Moreover, while the early development of public health ethics occurred in a western context, its reach, like public health itself, has become global. A second challenge, then, is to articulate an approach specific enough to provide clear guidance yet sufficiently flexible and encompassing to adapt to global contexts. Broadly speaking, public health ethics helps guide practical decisions affecting population or community health based on scientific evidence and in accordance with accepted values and standards of right and wrong. In these ways, public health ethics builds on its parent disciplines of public health and ethics. This dual inheritance plays out in the definition the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers of public health ethics: “A systematic process to clarify, prioritize, and justify possible courses of public health action based on ethical principles, values and beliefs of stakeholders, and scientific and other information” (CDC 2011). Public health ethics shares with other fields of practical and professional ethics both the general theories of ethics and a common store of ethical principles, values, and beliefs. It differs from these other fields largely in the nature of challenges that public health officials typically encounter and in the ethical frameworks it employs to address these challenges. Frameworks provide methodical approaches or procedures that tailor general ethical theories, principles, values, and beliefs to the specific ethical challenges that arise in a particular field. Although no framework is definitive, many are useful, and some are especially effective in particular contexts. This chapter will conclude by setting forth a straightforward, stepwise ethics framework that provides a tool for analyzing the cases in this volume and, more importantly, one that public health practitioners have found useful in a range of contexts. For a public health practitioner, knowing how to employ an ethics framework to address a range of ethical challenges in public health—a know-how that depends on practice—is the ultimate take-home message.

This casebook, now in its second edition, is a collaboration of over 90 individuals with expertise and training in public health pharmacy. A total of 54 chapters are presented, covering a broad array of topics relevant to pharmacy applications of public health. These topics include, but are not limited to, cross-cultural care, health literacy and disparities, infectious disease, health promotion and disease prevention, medication safety, structural racism, advocacy/policy analysis, chronic disease, women’s health, rural health, travel medicine and more. The book is designed to allow educators/students to choose chapters of interest as they feel suited, as each chapter is independent from the others. Each chapter contains learning objectives and an introduction to the topic, followed by a case and questions. The chapter closes with commentary from the authors and patient-oriented considerations for the topic at hand.