We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Roy Porter Student Prize Essay For the People's Health: Ideology, Medical Authority and Hygienic Science in Communist Czechoslovakia.
- Authors
Moore, Bradley Matthys
- Abstract
The communist political milieu offered distinct professional, scientific and socio-political advantages to agents of public health and hygiene in post-war Czechoslovakia. Hygienists employed the imperatives of Marxist-Leninism and Sovietisation to call for a fundamental reformulation of state and professional perspectives on population health, and further, to seek sweeping prerogatives over all the conditions of work and life in Czechoslovak society. Such an active and interventionist approach to preventive medicine, these hygienists asserted, was the primary route to the eradication of disease, the broad improvement of public health and the continued development of communism itself. The political and ideological demands of the regime largely aligned with existing environmentalist traditions in public health, and the leadership of Czechoslovakia's nascent state hygiene services therefore coordinated their research aims, professional programme and practical efforts with the philosophical and institutional imperatives of Soviet-style communism in their own disciplinary interests.
- Subjects
CZECHOSLOVAKIA; PUBLIC health; HYGIENE -- History; HYGIENE -- Social aspects; COMMUNISM; POLITICAL doctrines; PREVENTIVE medicine; ROCKEFELLER Foundation; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY; CZECHOSLOVAKIAN history, 1945-1992; SOCIAL history
- Publication
Social History of Medicine, 2014, Vol 27, Issue 1, p122
- ISSN
0951-631X
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1093/shm/hkt073