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The reason that this particular book is very respected and popular within the field of medical historiography is the ability to provide differing demographic perspectives on the same issues of public health. During the early to mid 1800s, the United States did not have a centralized governing public health body and as a result, the only way to provide a holistic understanding of how public health organizations began is to look not at one particular organization or region, but the vast growth of urban social systems to promote public health. The essence of this book is to provide a comprehensive understanding of how the social, political, economic and medical conditions of this particular era contributed to the growth of governmental and centralized responses to the growing crisis of disease control.

Although this book is successful in providing a very panoramic view of the growth of public health organizations, it is at times confusing because the editors present the essays in full without providing the circumstantial understanding of what each author discusses. This book would have been much more useful had the editors contributed an explanation and annotation of key concepts within each of these readings so that readers can easily understand key words and phrases that each author assumes are intelligible to their reader. However, the very fact that these works were collected together in one volume is extremely helpful to the overall understanding of medical history in this context. Therefore this book has successfully accomplished its mission and is a substantially enriching resource for the teaching of American medical and public health history.

Charles Rosenberg, advisory ed. Origins of Public Health in America: Selected Essays 1820-1855. New York, Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972.