Available From UC Press

American Health Crisis

One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics

Martin Halliwell

A history of U.S. public health emergencies and how we can turn the tide.

Despite enormous advances in medical science and public health education over the last century, access to health care remains a dominant issue in American life. U.S. health care is often hailed as the best in the world, yet the public health emergencies of today often echo the public health emergencies of yesterday: consider the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 and COVID-19, the displacement of the Dust Bowl and the havoc of Hurricane Maria, the Reagan administration’s antipathy toward the AIDS epidemic and the lack of accountability during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Spanning the period from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson to that of Donald Trump, American Health Crisis illuminates how—despite the elevation of health care as a human right throughout the world—vulnerable communities in the United States continue to be victimized by structural inequalities across disparate geographies, income levels, and ethnic groups. Martin Halliwell views contemporary public health crises through the lens of historical and cultural revisionings, suturing individual events together into a narrative of calamity that has brought us to our current crisis in health politics. American Health Crisis considers the future of public health in the United States and, presenting a reinvigorated concept of health citizenship, argues that now is the moment to act for lasting change.

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester. He has authored and edited fourteen books, including Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970; Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970–2000; and The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health.

"This is an ambitious book, a major achievement, and a tour de force. It covers a range of topics, each of which has books devoted to it, and it shows the connections amongst this vast array. If we consider the ways in which everything from housing and infrastructure to food politics and climate change falls readily into the overall definition of health, as well, of course, as the experience of a global pandemic, health is surely the number one concern not only of the majority of Americans, but globally as well. American Health Crisis reflects an astonishing amount of research and will become a sourcebook for anyone interested in the politics of health in the United States."—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

"This valuable book is a significant addition to American social and political history of the twentieth century. By seeking to integrate broad questions of environmental pollution, atomic energy, responses to pandemics, local and national politics Halliwell dives into the socio-biomedical responses to the changing world of the twentieth century. Halliwell adds a new perspective on what is sometimes needlessly seen as the narrow preserve of either scientists and medical actors or national political leaders. Local as well as national stories help us understand medicine and health policy as products of culture, geography, and science, not of the lab alone. Written in the midst of a pandemic where some political actors challenge some of our most cherished beliefs in science and the unlimited power of technology this deeply researched study of local and national health policy is a valuable contribution to American history writ large."––David Rosner, Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and History, Columbia University

“In American Health Crisis, Martin Halliwell brilliantly and poignantly explores US responses—or lack thereof—to critical health episodes of the past century. Halliwell offers an expansive, illuminating, and highly readable and engaging tour of health crises from the vital years 1918 to 2018, as told through eighteen engaging case studies. Along the way, readers come to grasp how the books core concepts, Disaster, Poverty, Pollution, Virus, Care, and Drugs, intertwine to shape American healthcare delivery and its discontents. A prescient pre-history of America's troubled COVID-19 response, American Health Crisis brings to life the resiliences of health services and diverse communities across the United States, and the human dimensions of health crises that ‘can easily disappear in a blizzard of high-level statistics.’ American Health Crisis is a vital must-read for anyone who wishes to better understand how the United States provides care, or fails to do so, in times of urgent need.”—Jonathan M. Metzl, Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society, Vanderbilt University

424 pp.6 x 9

9780520379404$29.95|£25.00Hardcover

May 2021