ISBN10: 0199260303, ISBN13: 9780199260300, [publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford] Hardcover First Edition Hardcover. The post war history of public health and the role of smoking within that history epitomises the tensions which surround taking health to the public. Public health history has largely concentrated on the nineteenth century sanitary period or on the years before the Second World War, often focussing on the environmental advances, or on the professional and occupational history of public health as an activity. This book has a different focus: it deals with the changein the outlook of public health post war. From a focus on services, vaccination, and dealing with health issues at the local level, public health had developed new discourse. Centring on chronicdisease, it became concerned with the concept of 'risk' and targeted individual behaviour. The mass media and centralised campaigning directed at the whole population replaced local campaigns, and politicians changed their mind about speaking directly to the public on health matters. Their early worries about the 'nanny state' gave place to a desire to inculcate new norms of behaviour, and it was debated how change was to be achieved.Identifying debates between thosebelieving in 'systematic gradualism' and those who advocated a more coercive approach, Virginia Berridge uses smoking as a model. Such debates brought into play tensions over the relationships ...
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