Managing the conduct of the individual life: Public health education and American public health, 1910 to 1940

This study explores why and how early 20th century public health workers embraced popular education as public health tool, and analyzes the form and content of these attempts to reshape American thinking about health. I rely on manuscript and published sources to show how educational materials and programs were created, and then I situate these materials and programs in their broader cultural, professional, and political contexts. Conquering disease, public health educators agreed, required that health experts learn how to guide individual, private behavior, to manage what one public health leader termed the conduct of the individual life. To do so, these interwar health workers looked to the commercial fields that seemed to have perfected the art and science of molding behavior--advertising, marketing, and public relations--and borrowed concepts and tools from such successful forms of mass persuasion. Health educators\u27 choice of commercial persuasion as a model for their own work had profound consequences, I suggest, for it contributed to the perception, encouraged by educators\u27 peers in advertising, marketing, and public relations, that personal health could be understood as a commodity to be bought and sold. Public health education was intended to sell more than personal health, however, because public health programs, departments, and officials also needed to be sold to American communities. Interwar health professionals agreed that average Americans needed to learn the value of supporting public health work, but often disagreed among themselves about the ideal form such work should take, and about the relative importance of official, voluntary, professional, private, and for-profit groups in it. This study shows that these groups sponsored educational programs and materials that reflected, reaffirmed, and endorsed different, even conflicting ideas about how preventive health services were to be delivered and by whom. Selling health to a public understood as a mass of consumers thus proved one way for groups with different ideological agendas to convince Americans that public health should be part of their lives