Description:
Reconstructing the mandates and activities of urban healthscapers between roughly 1250 and 1500, Roads to Health contends that preventive healthcare emerged from a steady concern for populations' wellbeing. It challenges the view of the Black Death, let alone the Industrial Revolution, as a unique trigger in public health history.
Review Quotes: "A field-changing book, Roads to Health shatters the prevailing narrative that public health administration emerged from industrialization and other processes of Euro-American modernization. Combining richly documented detail and bold historical sweep, G. Geltner demonstrates that teleological assumptions have obscured the history of premodern public health policies, practices, and preventive theories; have distorted efforts to historicize govermentality and biopower; and are complicit with agendas that have claimed public health as a characteristic of civilized, Western modernity."-- "Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island"