Health, Medicine, and the Media

Far more deeply than most of us realize, the media (in particular film, but also television, magazines, newspapers, and, more recently, the internet) has been intrinsic to the history of medicine and public health. For many of us, what we know about public health, medicine, and disease has come to us through the media. The medical profession, and public health policies, came into being in their modern forms during the second part of the nineteenth century, as medicine professionalized and as public health became defined, codified and embodied in government bureaucracies as well as public and private institutions. These developments have coincided with, and relied upon, the growth of popular media that reached audiences of a variety of classes and backgrounds.