Preliminary Programme

This paper will discuss changes in the politics of Norwegian health authorities to curb VD as from the end of Reglementation in the late 1880’s until the 1960’s. From a relatively high level in the 1890’s, the number of recorded cases of syphilis and gonorheea fluctuated vigourously, reaching an especially high level during the Second World War, but falling abruptly in the early 1950’s. By 1960, these diseases were becoming rare occurrences.

The focus will be on the problem of protecting the healthy without infringing on the civil liberties of the diseased. Routine measures at the municipal level until 1947 will be compared with initiatives at the national level, introduced through the Law on Measures against Venereal Disease, enacted in 1947. Special attention will be given to crises measures applied during the German occupation 1940 – 1945 and during the earliest after-war period.

Initiatives towards soldiers, sailors, prostitutes and “easy girls”will be compared, delineating accepted sexual behaviour for good male and female citizens. The importance of understandings of masculine and feminine sexuality for the nature of public health policies will be discussed, and possible changes highlighted. All through the paper, Norwegian policies will be seen in an international perspective, focussing mainly on Swedish, British, German and French policies. (Show less)

From the Mid-19th century on, nutrition became more and more a subject of scientific discourse. The science of nutrition was established as a specialised discipline, and the progress of food science cast new light on foodstuffs and nutrition. The results of food and nutrition research caught the attention of the general public, and the issue of healthy food for the people and the quality of the foodstuffs available were broadly discussed.
From the foundation of the Reich in 1871, complaints about fraudulently manipulated foodstuffs became increasingly numerous. Floods of newspaper articles, memoranda and encyclopædias on food quality denounced the lack of traders’ morals, informed about the most common manipulations and provided information to the layman on how to analyse the quality of their own food. Apart from the better possibilities on food analysis, the social, economic and cultural changes brought about by the process of industrialisation were the main factor for this new public attention for food quality. Un-der the conditions of urbanisation and division of labour, the old economy of self-supply was gradually, but at an ever increasing pace replaced by an economy with suppliers and consumers. New products and new markets were established, and food processing on the supplier side was itself an object of industrialisation and mechanisation. Needless to say that newly developed, artificial food additives allowed for new kinds of food ma-nipulation.
This paper gives an outline of the public debate on food manipulations and of the reme-dies sought. Who felt responsible for safeguarding people’s health, and who imple-mented the monitoring of food quality? The demand for new, federal legislation was a main topic of the discussion because the law on food monitoring was not a harmonised body of national law, but a patchwork of various municipal and state regulations before the Reich was founded. Most of these regulations were not up to the state of nutrition science. The federal government, the Reichsregierung, answered the demands of public health in 1876 by establishing the federal health office, the Reichsgesundheitsamt. One of the first projects of the health office was to draft a uniform law on the quality and monitoring of foodstuffs. The main objective of that new law, which was enacted in 1879, was the protection of public health, whereas most of the older, pre-industrial regu-lations were intended to prevent sellers from defrauding buyers.
The considerations on the uniform law on foodstuffs illustrate the different points of view on food quality, which themselves are heavily dependent on the construction of health to which a speakers adheres. The scientific experts entrusted with the drafting of the law sought to implement their ideas, which then where confronted with the views of food producers seeking to maintain the biggest possible flexibility for the production of foodstuffs. The legal construction of the terms “insalubrity” and “health hazard” was the central issue of the discussion. Nutritionists regarded any deterioration of the nutritional conditions as “hazardous”, whereas the food business was keen to narrow down the scope of the legal term.
Nutrition scientists and food suppliers, however, came together not only for contesting each other’s position, but also for co-operation. Some associations of food producers in their respective fields of food business relied on scientific advice in the establishment and implementation of quality standards for their members. Quality and health effects of the foods were ever more used as selling points, and branded foodstuffs, which were first introduced in Germany at that time, were intended to further consumer confidence. Yet consumers themselves did not play an active part in the attempts at food regulation, pressure groups for consumer interests can hardly be found at that time. Thus, consumer protection was largely a monopoly of nutrition scientists. Hence, it is not too much of a surprise that there is a conceivable gap between the consumer’s day-to-day appraisal of food quality and the ideas of the nutritionists: Where the science of nutrition was fo-cused on the nutritional values, food business tried to keep its products marketable, whereas the consumers’ preferences were taste and inexpensiveness. This leads to the question to what extent the debate on food quality perpetrated the public and reached the individual consumer. The nutritionist’s discourse took place in a public sphere, but it is likely that the consumers’ wealth and educational level formed a precondition for his concern about the quality of food. (Show less)

In the 1920s in Canada, the Federal Government’s Division of Child Welfare issued the nation’s first dietary guidelines aimed at encouraging women to breastfeed and also, somewhat ambivalently, encouraging women to feed cow’s milk to babies over 9 months of age. The early 1920s was a time of transition in milk processing and distribution. Some cities and provinces had strong sanitary hygiene laws to ensure that milk was free of disease and contamination but others did not so that general national guidelines promoting the use of cow’s milk were problematic.

These guidelines were promulgated at a time when many public health officials had begun to shift from vilifying milk, because of its potential to harbour dirt and bacteria and because of its well known links to infant mortality, to extolling its virtues because of its newly discovered rich vitamin and mineral content. The shift in milk’s status as an unhealthy liquid to the quintessential protective food for children, both in the public’s mind and in the mind of many public health practitioners, particularly those from cities that had managed to clean up their milk supply, was rapid and occurred while much the nation’s milk supply was in fact not safe. The promulgation of dietary guidelines promoting the consumption of cow’s milk for babies over 9 months at this time was inconsistent and likely quite dangerous particularly as Canada during the 1920s had the highest infant mortality rates in among industrialized nations.

The guideline was issued at a time of scientific enthusiasm over the new value of milk in protecting against under- nutrition and promoting optimal health. The dairy industry and the Federal Department of Agriculture unabashedly promoted the protective benefits of milk in large national campaigns overwhelming the ability of the Division of Child Welfare to deliver the best possible dietary guidelines for the times.

Given the pressures of the time it is difficult to blame this fairly new and weak policy division in the federal government. The relatively weak guidelines developed by the Division demonstrates how, in the absence of a strong health and nutrition policy center, inappropriate and perhaps unhealthy nutrition advice was too easily modified by the dairy industry and it’s representative in the federal government, the Department of Agriculture. (Show less)

We would like to show the advantages and disadvantages of the state health care in Czechoslovakia after communist coup in 1948. We are showing the real fall of the change of the health system and political philosophy of this transformation “from capitalist health care toward socialist”. We try to explain the different attitudes amnog states of soviet bloc and to show basic informations about Czechoslovak National Health Care in 1948 – 1953. (Show less)

Our contribution is set in the context of the study of institutional health education means in Spain during the first third of the XX Century, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War º in 1936.
This the period when the Spanish public health system was launched, particularly from the nineteen-twenties onwards. The theoretical umbrella of the Spanish public health institutions was social medicine. Experimental hygiene and the gathering and exploitation of statistical and numerical data were typical features of public health tasks during these years. But one of the main public health measures taken by Spanish health authorities were health campaigns to cope with (confront) specific problems such as infant mortality, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, malaria and other infectious diseases such as trachoma. Institutes and dispensaries served by staff trained specifically in public health, and health education were the main tools used in health campaigns. Furthermore, specialized departments of propaganda were set up within the framework of educational and sanitary administrations.
We are currently developing a research project in order to analyze health education in this period and institutional context. In previous research we centred our attention on books and booklets but now we are turning the focus to audiovisual material: posters, broadcasts, and films. All these means were designed to attract the attention of the population and to achieve a fast communication of the health education messages. Their main goals were to persuade or change behaviour patterns.
In this case we analyse two short health educational films, the only two found to date in the Spanish context. One of them is devoted to venereal diseases, the other to the care of children in order to avoid diseases and the fight against one of the major perceived health problems: infant mortality. We study the aims of the films, how the health problems are understood, specially the close relationship between health and moral issues, and the cinematographic language used to achieve the educational goals. Comparison is a central aim in our study given the very different characteristics of the two health problems the films deal with. (Show less)