FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 330:1024 April 7, 1994 Number 14 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited

Expanded edition. By George Rosen. 535 pp. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. $19.95. ISBN 0-8018-4645-5.

George Rosen's History of Public Health is a classic. As Elizabeth Fee implies in her thoughtful and perceptive comments, it is a classic because it presents an unclouded vision of the objectives of public health itself, as seen from the mid-20th century (it was originally published in 1958).

For Rosen, historical scholarship performed a social task, helping to mold the collective consciousness of humans:

A meaningful understanding of the present requires that it be seen in the light of the past from which it has emerged, of the future which it is bringing forth. . . . [t]he way in . . . [Full Text of this Article]