Public Health Concept in Developing Countries

The history of Public health development in the developing countries can be traced in four major topics:

1. Empirical Public Health
2. Colonial Public Health 
3. Age of Socialized Public Health
4. International Public Health: Health for All Movement

Each topic has been explained as different sub-topics:

1. Empirical Public Health:

Since ancient times, human life has been threatened with diseases of all kinds. Diseases like syphilis, measles, smallpox, cholera, leprosy, tuberculosis, etc. were rampant in all parts of the world for many centuries. Traditional medicine was significantly followed for management of illness at an individual level rather than public level.

Sanitation measures were enforced through royal decrees. The treatise on economics and government by Kautaliya (around 300 B.C.), during the early Maurya dynasty in India, showed how a king ensured the health and prosperity of his subjects through various measures and regulations.

Quarantine and prohibition were major measures used historically to protect people from the transmission of the diseases. Miasma theory, disease due to decayed organic matter was also popular in these days.

However, most of the historians have related the development of modern public health to the advert of basic medical sciences. The discovery of microscope, animal cells and bacteria, chemicals and other substances, other scientific knowledge and skills including those related to statistical and epidemiological methods in the developed world had provided the basis for a scientific explanation of the causes of diseases and illnesses as well as their mode of transmission. All these discoveries had some influences in developing world as well. Industrial revolution encouraged social interest in the prevention and control of diseases.

Owing to the scarcity of records, the health situation in the developing countries in the early centuries is little known. However, interest in social, environmental, and political aspects of diseases and their prevention grew tremendously.


Next, Go to Colonial Public Health