Public Health and Municipal Policy Making (Historical Urban Studies)

The power which medical knowledge has had in legitimising the rhetoric that surrounds municipal policy making is the focus of this study. Marjaana Niemi looks at two early twentieth-century public health campaigns concerned with infant welfare and the prevention of tuberculosis, which were aimed at improving health but which also served to regulate urban life and mediate social conflicts. Firstly, the book analyses the processes whereby different political aims became embedded in these 'apolitical' health campaigns, and, secondly, the role which the campaigns played in urban politics and governance. The political aims which public health campaigns advanced are explored by comparing health policies in Britain and Sweden. British and Swedish public health officials were part of one public health community, enjoying close links, attending the same conferences and contributing to the same journals. The problems they dealt with were often similar and in both countries health authorities claimed scientific grounds for their programmes. Yet the policies they pursued were often strikingly different. Through examination of two different national approaches, the book gives justice to the full complexity of the policy-making process and illuminates the wide range of factors that affected municipal policies.