Preventiebeleid vraagt om geheugen

Professional historical research might contribute a lot to the development of public health. Instead of historical anecdotes professional research pays attention to the social, political and cultural context of public health and employs a critical perspective to ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ of public health policy. As an example, the current rise of local public health policies are often presented as a magic bullet for public health problems. Historical reflections demonstrates that while these polices assume a vital moral community as a basis for this policy, this kind of community has vanished. This implies that we should invest much hard work to develop a new kind of community to make local public health policies successful.