Public Health

Ancient writers wrote extensively about the effect of the environment on health, and the mediaeval city authorities devised quarantine amongst other measures to contain plague. In its modern connotation of public health, which involves the state in the promotion of the health of the whole population, statistical measures of morbidity and mortality began with "political arithmetick" and the Bills of Mortality.

Doctors have been prominent social reformers since natural causes of disease supplanted the mediaeval belief that illness was a punishment for individual and collective sins.